Is Trump losing patience with Putin? Will sanctions against Russian oil giants hurt Putin? Russian forces have spread rapidly through Pokrovsk, the city in Ukraine's east where the warring sides have concentrated their manpower and tactical ingenuity during the past week, in what may be a final culmination of a 21-month battle. Geolocated footage placed Russian troops in central, northern and northeastern Pokrovsk, said the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a Washington-based think tank. It set its sights on the city almost two years ago, after capturing Avdiivka, 39km (24 miles) to the east.

Is Trump losing patience with Putin? Will sanctions against Russian oil giants hurt Putin? Russian and Ukrainian troops have fought battles in the ruins of Pokrovsk, a transport and logistics hub in eastern Ukraine, with Ukraine's military reporting fierce fighting under way in a part of the city that was key for Kyiv's front-line logistics. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he visited troops fighting near the eastern city of Dobropillia, where Ukrainian forces are conducting a counteroffensive against Russian troops. Russia struck civilian energy and port infrastructure in a massive overnight drone attack on Ukraine's southern region of Odesa, the region's governor said in a post on the Telegram messaging app, adding that rescuers extinguished fires and there were no casualties.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says he has visited troops near the town of Pokrovsk, where the fiercest front line battle between Russia and Ukraine is currently taking place. Zelensky posted photos showing him meeting personnel at a command post in the Dobropillya sector, some 20km (12 miles) north of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region. Kyiv's top military commander, Oleksandr Syrskiy, said on Monday that Ukraine was increasing pressure on the Dobropillya front to force the enemy to disperse its forces and make it impossible to concentrate their main efforts in the Pokrovsk area. Russia has been trying to seize Pokrovsk - a strategic frontline town and logistic hub - for over a year. Although it has taken them months to approach the town's borders, Russian soldiers have now infiltrated it and on Friday, Zelensky said Russia had amassed 170,000 troops on its outskirts.

Can Ukraine restore its pre-war borders? Why are Tomahawk missiles for Ukraine a'red line' for Russia? Is Russia testing NATO with aerial incursions in Europe? Russian drone and missile attacks across Ukraine on Saturday killed at least five people, while also cutting power to parts of the southern Odesa region, the AFP news agency reported, citing local officials. Two of the victims were killed in an attack on a church in Kostiantynivka in eastern Donetsk, AFP said.

How is Russia replenishing its military? What is a'coalition of the willing'? How China forgot promises and'debts' to Ukraine How are Europe, the US pulling apart on Ukraine? The Kremlin has announced it has "no alternative" but to continue waging war, as it pushed back on United States President Donald Trump's sudden sea change towards Ukraine that saw him brand Russia a "paper tiger". Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov hit back at Trump's claim that Ukraine could in effect win the war, declaring on Wednesday that Russia would be continuing its offensive on Ukraine "to ensure our interests and achieve the goals".

How is Russia replenishing its military? What is a'coalition of the willing'? How China forgot promises and'debts' to Ukraine How are Europe, the US pulling apart on Ukraine? Ukrainian drones attacked the Salavat petrochemical complex, controlled by energy giant Gazprom, in Russia's Bashkortostan, causing a fire, regional Governor Radiy Khabirov said on Wednesday via his Telegram channel. Ukraine's military struck two Russian oil distribution facilities in the Bryansk and Samara regions, as well as a military airfield in Russia-occupied Crimea, Kyiv's general staff said on Telegram.

How is Russia replenishing its military? What is a'coalition of the willing'? How China forgot promises and'debts' to Ukraine How are Europe, the US pulling apart on Ukraine? Ukrainian drones hit a key oil-processing and petrochemical complex in Russia's Bashkortostan region, as well as an oil refinery in the Volgograd region, as Ukraine escalates its campaign against Russia's extensive oil and gas sector. Russian military units claim to have breached Ukraine's western village of Yampol and secured new positions near five residential areas in the same area, according to Russia's state TASS news agency.

How is Russia replenishing its military? What is a'coalition of the willing'? How China forgot promises and'debts' to Ukraine How are Europe, the US pulling apart on Ukraine? Russia and Ukraine have been engaging in major aerial battles, targeting energy and transportation infrastructure, as Moscow presses its fierce ground assault in the Ukrainian east in the war's fourth year and tests a type of hypersonic weapon. Russia's Ministry of Defence announced on Sunday that its air defences shot down 361 drones, four guided aerial bombs, and rockets from a US-made high mobility artillery rocket system (HIMARS) overnight.

How is Russia replenishing its military? What is a'coalition of the willing'? How China forgot promises and'debts' to Ukraine How are Europe, the US pulling apart on Ukraine? NATO fighter jets headed to eastern Europe under new'Eastern Sentry' Russian attacks on Ukraine killed at least three people in the Donetsk region and another in Kharkiv, the Kyiv Independent reported on Saturday, citing local officials. A drone breached Romanian airspace during a Russian attack on Ukrainian infrastructure, prompting Romania to scramble fighter jets, the country's defence minister, Ionut Mosteanu, said.

Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) operate on battery power, making energy efficiency a critical consideration particularly in outdoor environments where terrain variations affect energy consumption. While prior research has primarily focused on computing energy-efficient paths from a source to a destination, these approaches often overlook practical scenarios where a robot needs to pick up an object en route--an action that can significantly impact energy consumption due to changes in payload. This paper introduces the Object-Pickup Minimum Energy Path Problem (OMEPP), which addresses energy-efficient route planning for Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) required to pick up an object from one of the many possible locations and take it to a destination. To address the OMEPP problem, we first introduce a baseline algorithm that employs the Z* algorithm, a variant of A* tailored for energy-efficient routing, to iteratively visit each pickup point. While this approach guarantees optimality, it suffers from high computational cost due to repeated search efforts at each pickup location. To mitigate this inefficiency, we propose a concurrent PCPD search that manages multiple Z* searches simultaneously across all pickup points. Central to our solution is the Payload-Constrained Path Database (PCPD), an extension of the Compressed Path Database (CPD), a state-of-the-art technique for fast shortest path computation, that incorporates payload constraints. We further demonstrate that PCPD significantly reduces branching factors during search, leading to improved overall performance. Although the concurrent PCPD search may produce slightly suboptimal solutions, extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that it achieves near-optimal performance while being one to two orders of magnitude faster than the baseline algorithm derived from existing methods.