For Ukraine – pitched against Russia’s larger and more powerful military – the use of unconventional tactics such as assassinations is seen as a vital way to fight back.

There is no official confirmation yet of who was behind the killing on Tuesday in Moscow of the head of Russia’s nuclear, biological and chemical defence forces.

But the Reuters news agency claimed the attack – which Russian investigators say involved a remotely detonated bomb planted in an e-scooter – was carried out by Ukraine’s security service, the SBU.

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If proven, the ability of Ukrainian agents to kill a top commander in the Russian capital will be ringing alarm bells inside the Kremlin and is an embarrassing security breach.

The target of the bomb blast was Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov. His assistant was also killed.

A day earlier, the SBU accused the Russian general of using banned chemical weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine.

The Ukrainian security service said it had recorded more than 4,800 uses of chemical weapons on the battlefield since February 2022, particularly of one specific type of combat grenade.

A source told Reuters that Kyiv regarded Lieutenant General Kirillov as a war criminal and an “absolutely legitimate target”.

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Moscow will surely seek to retaliate – whether or not the assassination is officially confirmed to be linked to Ukraine.

Either way, Kyiv will be bracing itself.

Donald Trump has said Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy have “gotta make a deal” to end the war between Russia and Ukraine.

The US president-elect said the conflict “has to stop” and that people were “dying at levels nobody has ever seen”.

He also claimed it could take “100 years” to rebuild Ukraine’s cities from the devastation of a full-scale Russian invasion that he said “should not” and “would not” have happened if he had been in office.

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It comes as President Putin claimed in a speech on Monday that the conflict was turning in his country’s favour after nearly three years of intense fighting, which has resulted in Russia occupying large swathes of Ukraine’s eastern territory.

President Zelenskyy has long been opposed to any peace deal with Mr Putin that leaves Moscow in control of Ukrainian territory, including the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia occupied in 2014.

However, speaking exclusively to Sky News last month, suggested a ceasefire deal could be struck if the territory he controls could be taken “under the NATO umbrella” – allowing him to negotiate the return of the rest later “in a diplomatic way”.

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‘It’s got to stop’

Mr Trump won a second White House term last month following a campaign in which he claimed he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in just “one day”.

On Monday, at a news conference at his Mar-a-Largo home in Florida, he repeated his desire to see an end to the fighting.

“Gotta make a deal,” Mr Trump said, before saying he would talk to Mr Putin and Mr Zelenskyy about bringing the conflict in Ukraine to an end.

He also said he had been shown pictures of body-strewn battlefields that reminded him of some of the grisly photographs from the 1861-1865 American Civil War.

“It’s got to stop,” he added.

Mr Trump did not give a direct answer when asked whether he believed Ukraine should cede territory to Russia as part of a negotiated settlement to end the war.

‘A turning point’

Earlier, Russia’s president made a speech at a defence meeting in which he suggested that a large number of men signing up for the country’s military voluntarily showed the tide of the Ukraine war was turning in Moscow’s favour.

“I would like to point out that the past year was a landmark year in achieving the goals of the special military operation [in Ukraine],” Mr Putin told top generals at the meeting in Moscow.

“Russian troops have a firm grip on the strategic initiative along the entire line of contact,” he said.

Around 427,000 troops signed army contracts this year, up from roughly 300,000 the year before, according to Russia’s defence ministry.

Speaking about this figure, Mr Putin said: “This flow of volunteers is not ending. And thanks to this… we are seeing a turning point on the frontline.”

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Russia has been making small gains into Ukrainian territory in recent months, reportedly at great human cost.

However, according to open source maps, Russian troops are now advancing at the fastest pace since the early days of its invasion in 2022.

Buildings have been damaged and there are reports of injuries after a powerful earthquake struck just off the coast of the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu.

The tremor was centred near Port Vila, the largest city on the group of 80 islands, at a depth of 35 miles (56km) below the earth’s surface on Tuesday, the US Geological Survey (USGS) said.

It was followed by a magnitude 5.5 aftershock at the same spot and the shudders continued throughout the afternoon and evening local time.

Communications with the country, which is home to around 330,000 people across its islands, were knocked out by the quake, making official information scarce.

But witness accounts of casualties arriving at hospitals began to surface on social media and through patchy phone calls.

Video posted online showed extensive damage to buildings, as well as vehicles and roads.

Soldiers were at the site of one collapsed building, whose awning had fallen onto cars, crushing them.

Another video showed what appeared to be extensive damage to the ground floor of the US embassy, where windows had buckled and walls turned to rubble.

Other foreign missions, including those of Britain, France, and New Zealand, suffered some damage, including buckled windows.

Another video, posted by Dan McGarry, showed aerial pictures of a “massive” landslide at the international shipping terminal.

Mr McGarry, a journalist based in Port Vila, told The Associated Press he heard of one death in the quake from a police officer outside Vila Central Hospital where he saw three people on gurneys “in obvious distress”.

Doctors were working “as fast as they could” at a triage centre outside the emergency ward, he added. But the nation is not equipped for a mass casualty event, Mr McGarry said, adding that the airport’s runway is also damaged.

Videos shared by the Vanuatu Broadcasting and Television Corporation also showed crowds outside the hospital.

Reports of people trapped inside buildings could not immediately be confirmed.

A Red Cross spokesperson in Fiji said the head of the aid agency’s Vanuatu office had reported widespread damage before communications were cut off.

The USGS issued a tsunami warning for waves of up to 30cm (11 inches) to 1m (39 inches) above the tide level for some coasts on Vanuatu but the warning was called off less than two hours after the quake.

Warnings of smaller waves were issued for a number of nearby Pacific Island countries, including Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Solomon Islands.

Vanuatu government websites were offline in the aftermath of the quake and phone numbers for the police and other public agencies did not connect, making it difficult to confirm details.

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Authorities in Australia and New Zealand said there was no tsunami threat to their countries.

Katie Greenwood, a Fiji-based regional head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, posted on social media platform X to say trained Red Cross volunteers were on the ground in Vanuatu and ready to assist affected communities.