Russia storms Ukrainian stronghold in fastest push for two years

Moscow’s troops continue with ‘scorched earth’ tactic in bid to take Vuhledar in eastern Donbas

Russian soldiers have stormed a Ukrainian stronghold on the front line as they push forward at their fastest rate for two years.
Moscow’s forces have been using a “scorched earth” tactic to capture Vuhledar, a coal-mining town dominated by Soviet-era apartment blocks, according to reports from Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.
Vuhledar has never before been captured, but pro-Kremlin military bloggers appeared confident that Russian forces would now overwhelm the town’s Ukrainian defenders.
“Russian units have entered Vuhledar. The storming of the town has begun,” said Yuri Podolyaka, a Ukrainian-born but pro-Russia military blogger.
Vuhledar lies on an important road west of Donetsk, the main Russian-controlled city in Donbas, and had a population of around 15,000 before the start of the war.
Commentators said capturing the town would improve Russia’s strategic position and provide a launchpad for more attacks on Ukrainian targets.
Drone footage showed thick grey-black smoke covering the town, punctured by regular flashes from artillery attacks.
Deep State, a Ukrainian military blogging site, said the situation in Vuhledar was “critical”.
“The Russians are trying to surround the settlement, and at the same time, they are simply razing it to the ground with artillery and glide bombs,” it said.
Elsewhere on the front line, Kremlin forces continued to move towards the strategically important town of Pokrovsk, around 35 miles north of Vuhledar, Russian military bloggers said.
Even further north, Russian forces were reportedly pushing towards the Oskil River near Kupyansk.
Glide bombs, standard bombs retrofitted with basic homing devices and fins, have become an important part of Russia’s arsenal.
They have primarily been used along the Donbas frontline and against the northern city of Kharkiv, but the Kremlin appears to have approved their expanded use. 
Reports this week, said that they had been used for the first time to pound the Ukrainian-held city of Zaporizhzhia, in southern Ukraine.
News of Russian progress on the front lines came as a leaked draft of the country’s 2025 federal budget showed that Vladimir Putin was planning a 25 per cent increase in military spending to 13.2 trillion roubles (£106 billion).
This equals around 6.2 per cent of Russia’s GDP and 40 per cent of the Kremlin’s total government spending. Britain spends roughly £57 billion on its defence budget each year.
Analysts said that the rise in military spending showed that Putin was preparing for a long war.
“The economic price of this doesn’t seem a concern for Putin,” said Alexandra Prokopenko, a former adviser to the Russian Central Bank and a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre, in Berlin.
The Kremlin has prioritised its war in Ukraine over Russian civil society, switching civilian factories to drone and artillery shell production.
Last week, the Kremlin said it wanted to increase its army by 180,000 personnel to 1.5 million.
This follows a major recruitment drive fuelled by patriotic fervour over the Ukrainian assault on the southern Kursk region, the first invasion of Russia since the Second World War, and a rise in signing-on bonuses.
The British Ministry of Defence said that the Russian army was desperate for more recruits because of its high attrition rate.
It described Russian soldiers as “cannon fodder” and likened the army to a factory feeding faceless humans along a conveyor belt through to their deaths.
“Russia’s mass infantry tactics require a constant flow of recruits to replenish frontline forces,” it said.
Russia has suffered around 610,000 casualties since it invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Every day, over the past four months, it has lost 1,100 soldiers to death or injury.