UNITED24 Media Telegram Highlights
❗️ The previous night, the Russians launched a new attack drone on Kyiv, reports Defense Express.
The drone operated at an ultra-low altitude of 20-30 meters and had a speed comparable to another strike drone of the "Shahed" type.
The Ministry of Defense of Great Britain has announced that the country will resume the production of artillery barrels for Ukraine.
This includes 155-mm self-propelled guns AS-90 and towed 105-mm howitzers L119. Sheffield Forgemasters, a British company known for producing some of the largest and most technically complex cast and forged steel parts in the world, will assist in this production effort.
Hungary faces a fuel crisis as Ukraine increases pressure on Russian oil supplies, — Politico.
"Ukrainian measures can create a difficult situation," said Ilona Gizinska, a researcher and expert from Hungary at the Center for Eastern Studies. She believes that Hungarians could face skyrocketing energy prices and power shortages within weeks if no solution is found.
After the start of the conflict, the EU imposed an embargo on the import of Russian oil entering the bloc by sea but excluded pipelines — particularly the Druzhba pipeline to Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic — to give those countries time to find alternative supplies.
Now Ukraine has taken matters into its own hands.
"We've been waiting for more than two years for the EU and the G7 to impose real sanctions on Russian oil. We've tried all the diplomatic solutions, but they haven't worked... So it looks like we're going to have to find some other ways to deal with them," said Verkhovna Rada deputy Inna Sovsun, noting that 200,000 barrels are still being transported through the pipeline daily.
Germany is confronting a very real threat from the Russian Federation, necessitating a significant increase in the military budget for 2025, as stated by German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius.
The total planned expenses for 2025 are €480.6 billion, with defense expenditures accounting for €53 billion. This marks an increase of €1.25 billion compared to the current year. Pistorius emphasized the need to raise the defense budget by at least six billion euros to adequately address the security challenges posed by Russia.
Russia continues to recruit Cubans to fight in Ukraine despite opposition from Havana — Bloomberg
Volunteers are enlisting through unofficial channels, and the total number of combatants is likely to be in the hundreds, although exact details are difficult to ascertain, the source said.
According to Reuters, the reason the US is unable to increase the production of Patriot missiles at Japanese factories is the shortage of key components produced by Boeing.
To assemble more PAC-3 missiles, more homing heads for these missiles are needed. New assembly lines at the Boeing plant, which will make it possible to do this, will only start operating in 2027, the agency notes.
According to Reuters, Washington wants to increase the production of PAC-3 missiles on a global scale from 500 to more than 750 units per year "as quickly as possible."
The German association of journalists, Netzwerk Recherche, has expelled Hubert Seipel, the author of Vladimir Putin's biography, from its ranks. The organization stated that Seipel "violated the basic rules of independent journalism and severely undermined trust in our profession."
Seipel's expulsion follows revelations that he received payments from the Russian Federation, which Netzwerk Recherche described as "contrary to all the rules of journalistic honesty and professionalism."
In November 2023, it was disclosed that Seipel, who authored a documentary film and two books about Putin, received hundreds of thousands of euros from offshore accounts linked to Russian oligarch Alexei Mordashov. In 2018, Seipel signed a "sponsorship agreement" which was set to bring him at least 600,000 euros for the creation and promotion of a book about the "political climate in Russia."