Fears Ukraine will run out of missile defences

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Is President Trump snubbing South Korea to reignite his friendly relationship with Kim Jong-un? I'm Asma Khaled, and I host the Global Story podcast from the BBC. The U.S. and South Korea have been close allies since the 1950s. But this week, Trump announced that the U.S. will substantially reduce joint military exercises with South Korea. He cited his very good relationship with North Korea's Kim Jong-un. For more, check out The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:40Hello, welcome to NewsHour from the World Service, coming to you live from London. I'm Paul Henley. President Zelensky says that more than 600 emergency workers have been dealing with the aftermath of the latest Russian strikes on Ukraine today. In what has been a significant escalation in hostilities, 15 people were killed in the capital, Kiev, alone. The government's made a renewed appeal for more international help with defence. More on that soon. First, our Ukraine correspondent Dan Johnson reports from Kiev.

1:14This is Solomansky, a suburb in Kiev that was hit last night, and this neighbourhood has been almost entirely devastated. There are residential apartment blocks here reaching up eight or nine storeys. They've been hit by missiles, but somehow they're still standing. It looks like, from the pictures the emergency services were showing me, the missiles hit the roof, embedded in the building, then destroyed the flats essentially from the inside out. So all the windows are gone. Most of the flats look totally ruined, but the blocks are still standing. There's glass and debris right across the road.

1:49A huge number of emergency service workers here. And the residents, those who survived, are milling around trying to work out what's left. Valeria told me she's been living here for four years after moving from Mykolaiv when her house there was bombed. Welcome to my home. Is everybody safe? Yep. Right now, yep. That seems to be a miracle. Yep. just around the corner we found what looks like the focus of this strike and here the devastation is total an entire building has gone there are a number of cars here absolutely wrecked overturned scattered far and wide there's debris right across the ground over into the neighboring school covering the playing fields the school building has been damaged too it looks like this was the heating centre that provided heat to all these surrounding residential blocks.

2:46So even if people were able to move back into these homes, they're likely to be without power or heating for the foreseeable future. The mayor of Kiev, Vitaly Klitschko, turned up here this morning. I managed to grab a quick word with him. It's very important to be strong. It's very important to have support from our partners because together we are times stronger. In a way, there is a reason to destroy critical infrastructure, especially in last winter. Let people are freezing, living without heating, electricity, water. It's just one goal. Break the resistance of Ukrainians and the dream of Putin.

3:23We have to give up. It's never happened. We're ready to fight. The air defences of this country are overstretched, aren't they? You're running out of the Patriot missile interceptors. How desperate is that situation? We need ammunition, we need anti-missile systems, we need support from our partners, because it's protection for our civilians, it's the life of our citizens. Dan Johnson reporting, and as he said, Ukraine is rapidly running out of missiles capable of intercepting Russian ballistic strikes. As Moscow ups its weapons production, many Ukrainians fear they could be facing an extremely difficult winter of danger and of power and water outages.

4:04Antonia Longford's a journalist in Kiev who reports on Ukraine for the UK's Daily Telegraph newspaper. Earlier I asked her how obvious it was that Kiev was increasingly lacking the weapons to defend itself. Yeah, I would say it's extremely noticeable. So Russia is attacking currently at a rate of about once every three or four days, normally with these huge ballistic barrages, which come with little to no notice and cause quite widespread damage across the city. And we're seeing time and time again that none of those ballistic missiles are being shot down. I think a good illustration of how dire the situation has been is that Ukraine's air force, which usually posts kind of a tally of each attack in terms of the missiles launched and the missiles that they've managed to take down, stop publishing this data for fear that it could damage public morale.

4:49That's actually now being restored after a great deal of public backlash, but I think it gives a sense of how much fear there is. How bad is the shortage of missile interceptors and how come? So in terms of actual figures, that's quite a closely guarded secret, but it seems to be quite sort of about as bad as it could get. So Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told CNN last week that Kiev has two and a half times fewer interceptors than it had in 2025. And Ukrainian officials also showed CNN an empty Patriot launcher system just outside Kiev, which they said had been empty for around six weeks.

5:21in terms of obviously how this is playing out for civilians. We've seen civilian deaths rising month on month to levels not seen since the early days of the full-scale invasion. And that's largely driven by kind of the destructiveness of these long-range aerial attacks. And in terms of reasons for it, there's kind of myriad reasons. Obviously, there are kind of global shortages of these weapons. And there's this obviously ongoing dispute between Kiev and Washington over whether Kiev should be granted the licenses to produce patriots itself. Right, so that partly rules out the supply of alternatives, or at least manufacturing alternatives.

5:56How much is down to increased demand because of the Iran war? I think the Iran war has certainly been a huge factor in that. Stockpiles have really been pushed down because of the somewhat sort of gluttonous use of these interceptors in the conflict with Iran. There were reports earlier this month, for example, that the US military had burned through half of its Patriot interceptors in that war since February. And it's also consumed four fifths of its terminal high altitude area defense missile inventory, which is another anti-ballistic system. These interceptors have an extremely long production cycle and only around 600 are produced per year.

6:29So that kind of exacerbates this quite serious scarcity. And beyond begging for more, what options does Ukraine have? Well, I think there are options being posited. So for example, there's the pan-European anti-ballistic system, which is being called Freya, but it's still not realistic to assume this could come anytime soon. Ukraine's also making quite a concerted effort to fight back against these shortages it has on the defence side by hitting Russian missile launches on Russian soil. And we've seen a kind of quiet campaign aiming to achieve that. And what's worse potentially for Ukraine, that the shortages of these weapons could make them lose the war potentially or that they undermine civilian morale to a point that Russia would presumably celebrate?

7:17Well, I think they certainly undermine civilian morale. We've seen that in Kyiv. Again, these high levels of civilian casualties. We've also seen them affecting kind of logistics. I've noticed myself in Kyiv, supermarket shelves increasingly empty. We've also seen them striking energy infrastructure that's in preparation for their winter campaign, and that will certainly make winter the hardest it's been for Ukraine since the start of the full-scale war. But obviously, of course, any intensive missile campaigns targeting rail hubs and supply depots complicates kind of fuel, ammunition and reserves, which go to troops on the front line as well.

7:52Antonia Longford. Russia offers men the equivalent of tens of thousands of pounds to join its military and be sent to fight in Ukraine, but as the war escalates with no end in sight, There are increasing signs that Moscow is finding it harder to recruit the numbers it needs. Russian soldiers recently captured in Ukraine have confirmed that, and they've talked of a high casualty rate. The BBC visited a prisoner of war camp to see the conditions there and to meet some of the men waiting to be sent home in the next exchange of soldiers. But not all of them were Russian, as Sarah Rainsford reports.

8:28In western Ukraine, behind layers of locked gates, There's a camp full of soldiers captured fighting for Russia. But I went there to meet the Ukrainians who went to war against their own country. So just come into the prison yard, coils of barbed wire and cameras everywhere. There are a few dozen prisoners of war in navy blue uniforms and with caps. They've just all headed for the shadows because it's baking hot here. Speaking to men in captivity is complicated. But when there's no access to soldiers in Russia itself, it does help reveal the dynamics of this war, and it helps explain what drives the people fighting it.

9:18But anyone who agreed to speak, I interviewed far from any guards and without a camera.

9:26Anton was born in eastern Ukraine. a part of the Donbass that's been controlled by Moscow since 2014. The year that Vladimir Putin escalated to a full-scale invasion, Anton turned 18 and he signed up to fight immediately for Russia. I don't regret my choice. I went to defend my land. So did all his friends. They all went to different units. Then you get the SMS messages. Dead, dead, dead. Other prisoners tell me the same, that everyone they went to fight with has been killed and that fewer men are now volunteering to replace them. When Ukrainian-born soldiers like Anton are captured, they're tried for treason.

10:15But Anton doesn't see himself as a traitor. An entire generation has now grown up in occupied areas with Russian schooling and with media controlled by the Kremlin. Anton has absorbed all of it, and like Russia, he calls the government in Kiev Nazis. He also thinks Vladimir Putin should keep pushing to control the whole Donbass, even though hundreds of thousands have already been killed trying. Of course I think it could have cost a lot less, but war is war. It could have been ended, but no one wanted to do that.

10:56In the prison hospital, there was another man from the Donbass, wrapped in bandages. Artem signed up to fight on the promise of a big cash bonus, but he never got it. And now he has a body full of shrapnel.

11:16I've got inside a workshop here in the prison camp. And I've just seen what these men are making. These Russian prisoners of war are mass-producing wooden coffins.

11:33In the next workshop, I met a drug dealer making artificial Christmas trees. Konstantin said he had one reason only for going to fight. It got him out of jail. For me, 15 years in prison was too much. I know it probably doesn't excuse me, but it's a fact. But he would be killing Ukrainians, I said, fighting the country he was born in. I see nothing good in any war, and in a war like this, there can be nothing good, by definition. But he still thinks he was right to fight, although he says everyone he knows has now had enough.

12:20The prisoners are fighting into the dining hall now with their heads bowed and their hands behind their backs. As they eat, there's a film playing on a loop which describes itself as the truth about Crimea, basically an attempt to counter Russia's claim that the peninsula has always been Russian, although I can't say anyone's paying it much attention.

12:47Ukraine's real focus is on these men's practical value, because potentially they can be swapped to bring Ukraine's own soldiers home. Only when it comes to the negotiations, it turns out that the men from the Donbass who risked everything for Russia are way down Moscow's priority list. Konstantin says only a handful of them have been swapped so far, and he thinks they'll be the very last to leave here. Sarah Rainsford reporting from Ukraine. You're with the BBC World Service live from London. This is NewsHour.

13:30Astronomers in Germany have discovered the fastest star in the Milky Way. The star, named S301, travels at 25 ,000 kilometres a second around the supermassive black hole that sits at the centre of our galaxy. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics say it orbits so dangerously close to the black hole that it could help to explain the properties of that black hole and to test Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. Dr Megan Argo is an astrophysicist at the University of Lancashire here in England. She specialises in supernovas and black holes, and I asked her first to put this finding into context.

14:12A black hole, this is a supermassive black hole, so it's one of the largest black holes that we know of. It's certainly the biggest black hole by far in our galaxy, and it weighs about four million times the mass of our sun. So this is, by our local standards, this is a very, very massive object. And what massive objects do is they actually distort the fabric of space-time that's around them. So the sun distorts the fabric of space-time in the solar system, and we can measure that on our local scales. But this being, you know, four million times heavier distorts space-time in a much more significant way.

14:49And the closer you are to something that's this massive, the faster you are moving. How do we know that it's moving that fast? How do we track it? We track it using sensitive telescopes. So these observations were carried out by the very large telescope, which is actually multiple telescopes on a mountaintop in Chile. And what the VLT does is it actually combines the light from four separate telescopes to effectively synthesize a much bigger telescope. So it's equivalent to having an optical telescope that's 120 meters in diameter. And the size of that telescope not only gives you good sensitivity, but it also gives you very, very good resolution.

15:26So effectively very, very tiny pixels that lets you see lots and lots of detail at the distance of this object. And the importance of this star, I understand, is in what it tells us about the black hole. Explain, if you can. Yeah, that's right. So we've been watching stars orbit the black hole in the centre of our galaxy, called Sagittarius A star. We've been watching this for many, many years now. And this one is exciting because it's the fastest one we've observed, but it's also the one that passes the closest to the black hole. And the reason that's really important is because we can use the orbits of these stars that go around the black hole to measure the mass of the black hole.

16:05That's how we know it's 4 million times the mass of the sun. But one of the really tricky parameters about black holes that we don't have a good handle on because it's so hard to measure is how fast they spin and in what direction they're spinning. And if you have a star that passes close enough, and we think this one is passing close enough, you can actually take a measurement of how that black hole is spinning. And that gives us, apart from anything else, gives us another way to test Einstein's general theory of relativity. It's been tested loads of times in loads of different ways, but lots of experiments to test it make it more robust as a theory.

16:40So the fact that this pass is so close to that black hole is going to allow us to measure the spin of the black hole over the next sort of 10, 20 years and do another high precision test of general relativity. And for those who aren't closely acquainted with Einstein's theory of general relativity what exactly is being tested here general relativity describes essentially gravity and how things behave in gravitational fields and it's how we understand the details of the motions of our planets in our solar system there are ways you can measure them involving older simpler bits of physics but they don't explain fully the motions of the planets in the solar system only the corrections that you apply from general relativity actually allow you to measure them in detail.

17:28So it's a really, it's one of the most detailed ways we have of understanding the gravity and the forces that gravity plays on objects in the universe. That was Dr Megan Argo, who's an astrophysicist from the University of Lancashire. She specialises in supernovas and black holes.

17:54Now, a reported discovery of gold in a remote part of western Kenya has triggered a rush of fortune seekers from across the region, including from neighbouring Uganda. Hundreds have arrived in a village called Cheporor in West Pokot County, hoping to strike gold and enrich themselves. But the sudden influx is putting pressure on a community that has little infrastructure and it's raising concerns about security and safety, as the BBC's Akisa Wanderer reports. Before sunrise, the digging begins in this remote village in western Kenya. Hundreds of people are searching for something they hope will change their lives, gold.

18:40Some hack at the rocky ground with holes and shovels, others sift mud and sand along a nearby riverbank, watching closely for even the smallest speck of gold. Just a few weeks ago, Cheporor was a quiet, sparsely populated community. Today, it is the centre of a gold rush. Residents say the rush began earlier this month after reports emerged that gold had been discovered here. Manase Lomachar says he was among the first residents to get the gold. I was looking for a goat that had gone missing. We thought it had given birth somewhere in the bushes. That's when I came across some women who were paning for gold in the water.

19:26I joined them in the search and that's how we discovered there was gold in this area. News of the discovery spread quickly. Within days, thousands of prospectors had arrived. West Pokot's Deputy County Commissioner Samuel Kiari told the BBC social media helped fuel the influx. We had approximately 10 ,000 people from all over the area, from neighboring counties and even from the neighboring country of Uganda. And the number has drastically reduced to average 2 ,500 people because, you know, the expectations were so high. The village has been transformed almost overnight. But was there really gold to be found?

20:13I can confirm because when we went there, traders in gold. They told us every day they are getting an average of 100 people who are selling gold to them. But unfortunately, the amount of gold might not be so huge. Among those drawn here is Ugandan artisanal miner Mugisha Godfrey. We sleep under the trees and when morning comes, we continue working. Sometimes we work both day and night. As for going back home, we can't return unless we find something. The rush has also created opportunities for traders who've travelled hundreds of kilometres to sell food, water and basic supplies to the growing population.

21:02One of them is Irene Ameja, who came from a neighboring county hoping to earn enough money to expand her business. By the sudden, population boom is exposing the area's lack of infrastructure. There is limited access to clean water, few sanitation facilities and growing concerns about safety, particularly for women. This is a forest and we're in the middle of the mountains. We don't have clean water to drink or even bathe. For women, the biggest challenge comes in the evening or at night. You'll have to find somewhere safe to go and stay because most of the people sleeping here are men. Local authorities say security has been reinforced while health and sanitation measures are being expanded.

21:48And although many prospectors have already left after finding little or no gold, others remain undeterred. For those still digging in Cheporor, the possibility of a life-changing discovery is reason enough to keep searching. The BBC's Akisa Wanda are reporting there from Western Kenya. This is the BBC World Service and NewsHour, live from London.

22:22I'm Paul Henley and this is NewsHour.

22:28Is the West Bank reaching a tipping point? I'm Asma Khaled, and I host the Global Story podcast from the BBC. For more than a week, homes in the village of Qusrat have been under siege, including one of a Palestinian-American man from Ohio. It's just the latest to draw attention to the rise of settler violence in the West Bank, which the UN says is higher than at any point in the last 20 years. For more, listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

22:59Welcome back to NewsHour. A tanker off the coast of Yemen has been seized by armed men who've diverted it towards Somalia. The vessel was in the Gulf of Aden when it was approached by an unauthorised boat and sent out a distress call. It also coincides with Iran's threats to get its Houthi allies in Yemen to block shipping in the Red Sea. The BBC's Barbara Plett Usher in Nairobi told me first what had happened to that ship. So according to maritime security agencies, a ship was boarded by six armed men in the Gulf of Aden off the coast of Yemen, and then they redirected it toward the coast of Somalia.

23:42and what we understand is that this is a Comoros-flagged oil tanker. So that's what we know so far about what has happened. But it should be said that this suggests action by Somali pirates, especially if it's heading towards Somalia. And in that case, it would be the second hijacking of a ship already this week. Another one was taken over on Monday. So that's the information we have and it is against the backdrop of an uptick in Somali pirate activities since about April. What should we make of that uptick? Should we read anything into it? There's lots of different elements to the reason why Somalis might have gone back to piracy.

24:26One is local conditions. There's been illegal foreign trawlers overfishing off the coast of Somalia. So you have quite a large number of foot soldiers prepared to do this kind of thing again because their livelihoods are at stake. I think another possibility might be opportunity. I think there's been increased traffic along the coast of Somalia in the western Indian Ocean, into which the Gulf of Aden empties, and that's because the Strait of Hormuz has been blocked. So there isn't a direct connection to the Strait of Hormuz crisis that we can see, but I think there's been a broader deterioration of regional maritime security, as the focus has mostly shifted towards that area.