Ukraine-Russia war latest: Putin will run out of troops in 2028 with morale ‘very low’, says Kyiv spy chief

Kyiv’s spy chief has predicted that the Russian army could run out of troops and military resources by 2028 with morale “very low” in Moscow’s ranks.

Lieutenant General Oleh Ivashchenko, the head of the intelligence directorate in Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence, said Russia’s resources will only last for another 16 months.

“Russia has military and economic resources for the next year, but we estimate it will end in 2028,” he told The Times .

“Russia recruits roughly 1,000 people every day, sometimes 1,200, but look at these casualty figures. Yesterday it was 1,410, the day before it was 1,511. Of those, around 60 per cent are killed in action,” he added.

Meanwhile, at least five people were killed and 67 others were injured as Russian drones hit a shopping mall in Pavlohrad, a city in southeastern Ukraine .

Officials said shops and vehicles were hit in the daylight attack which took place "when there were many people on the streets". The injured include three teenage boys aged 13, 14 and 15.

Ukraine also carried out drone attacks on Russia, killing two people in the Tula region overnight and one on Friday in the Kursk region, local officials said.

With fighting on the front line largely stalled more than four and a half years into the war in Ukraine, Russia and Ukraine increasingly have struck logistics and other economic targets in recent weeks to try to damage the other's war effort.

Russia attacked two Kyiv petrol stations with jet-powered drones early on Friday, killing two people in an escalation of strikes that president Volodymyr Zelensky said were becoming "increasingly terrorist in nature".

Three more people were killed in Russian strikes in southeastern Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia regions and in ⁠Kharkiv in the northeast, according to the governors of those regions.

The European Commission has approved a disbursement of 6.1 billion euros (£5.2bn) to Ukraine, which it can use to buy Patriot air defence missiles and other supplies.

The funds are part of the 90 billion euros (£77.2bn) support loan the EU has promised Ukraine.

The new disbursement means the 28.3 billion euro in military support promised from the loan for 2026 has now been allocated, the Commission said.

Portugal has declared that it supports the use of frozen Russian assets to assist Ukraine, but is understanding of Belgium’s concerns over the financial risks, foreign minister Paulo Rangel said.