Russia 'to move paratroopers from Syria to Ukraine', says Kyiv

Russia will send paratroopers based in Syria to Ukraine as it struggles to beat back Kyiv's advancing troops, the Ukrainian armed forces claimed on Tuesday.

Russia decided to pull units from its 217th Paratroop Regiment from Syria - where Russian forces have been present since 2015 to prop up President Bashar al-Assad - to send them to Ukraine, according to a Facebook post by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine quoting spokesperson Alexander Stupun.

Stupun said Russia was suffering "significant losses" in Ukraine thanks to a push by Ukrainian forces in the east of the country.

Moscow and some Syria analysts have repeatedly denied reports of Russian major redeployments from Syria to Ukraine but the news comes as President Vladimir Putin ordered the country's first mobilisation since the Second World War.

He also warned that Moscow would respond with the might of all its vast arsenal if the West continued what he called its "nuclear blackmail".

Putin's invasion of Ukraine, which began in February, has killed tens of thousands of people and unleashed global food and fuel crises that hit the world’s poorest nations hardest.

Fighting around nuclear reactors in Ukraine has also heightened fears of a nuclear disaster on a scale comparable to that of the Chernobyl catastrophe of 1986.

There were reports in April that mercenaries from the Russian group Wagner had been moved from Libya to Ukraine to shore up Moscow's war effort.