Ukraine set for new defence chief as fears grow over North Korean arms sales to Russia

Ukraine prepared to appoint a new defence minister on Tuesday amid heavy fighting in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region and growing US concern that North Korea could supply weapons to Russia after a possible summit between their leaders.

Asked about US media reports that Russian president Vladimir Putin would host North Korean counterpart Kim Jong-un for arms talks this month in the Pacific port city of Vladivostok, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “We have nothing to tell you.”

Earlier, White House national security council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said the US had “warned publicly [that] arms negotiations between Russia and the DPRK [North Korea] are actively advancing… We have information that Kim Jong-un expects these discussions to continue, possibly to include high-level diplomatic engagement in Russia.”

Moscow is seeking arms, ammunition and foreign friends as it wages a war against Ukraine that has ground on for 18 months, killed and injured hundreds of thousands of people and left Russia in economic and diplomatic isolation from the West and its allies.

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Ukraine said on Tuesday that its forces were continuing to make small gains and consolidate liberated territory in the Zaporizhzhia region, which is the focus of a counteroffensive aimed at cutting Russia’s land link to occupied Crimea on the Black Sea.

A Moscow-appointed official in the region published footage that he said showed a British Challenger tank in flames in the region, which would be the first recorded destruction in Ukraine of one of the tanks supplied to Kyiv by London.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy asked his country’s parliament to appoint Rustem Umerov as defence minister, and deputies are expected to approve the move on Wednesday, when US secretary of state Antony Blinken is reportedly planning to visit Kyiv.

Mr Umerov (41) is the head of Ukraine’s main privatisation agency and a member of its Crimean Tatar minority, which was deported en masse from its Black Sea homeland by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1944, and only allowed to return decades later.

He is set to replace Oleksiy Reznikov (57), who resigned this week at Mr Zelenskiy’s request after leading the defence ministry for almost two years and spearheading its acquisition of high-tech western weaponry to counter Russia’s all-out invasion.

[ Kim Jong-un plans to visit Russia to discuss weapons, officials say ]

Mr Zelenskiy visited units near the battlefield hotspot of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine and gave out medals to soldiers who have been retaking territory around the destroyed city since it was occupied in May by Russian forces led by mercenaries from the Wagner group.

In Russia, Mr Putin added a conspiracy theory to his unfounded claim that Ukraine is led by “Nazis”, telling state television that the West had placed Mr Zelenskiy – who has Jewish heritage - in power to “cover up the anti-human essence that is the foundation… of the modern Ukrainian state”.

“This makes the whole situation extremely disgusting, in that an ethnic Jew is covering for the glorification of Nazism,” Mr Putin added.

Cuba, which has good ties with the Kremlin, said it was combating efforts to recruit its citizens to fight for Russia in Ukraine.

The foreign ministry in Havana said Cuba “is working to neutralise and dismantle a human trafficking network that operates from Russia in order to incorporate Cuban citizens living there and even some living in Cuba, into the military forces that participate in military operations in Ukraine… Cuba is not part of the war in Ukraine.”

[ Fintan O’Toole: The West must help Ukraine to define victory differently ]