Moscow declared a state of emergency in two regions after a major Ukrainian drone strike caused large explosions at a military airfield and Kyiv pursued its most ambitious incursion into Russian territory in a decade of war.

The unexpected offensive, which raged into a fourth day on Friday, is the largest attack by Kyiv’s forces on Russian soil, not only since President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but at least since the Kremlin’s covert invasion of Crimea and the Donbas 10 years ago.

The assault aims to divert Russia’s troops from the east, expose its weaknesses and strengthen Kyiv’s position in future negotiations with Moscow, said an adviser to the government, after months of Russian gains on the more than 1,000km-long front of the grinding war within Ukraine.

A state of emergency was declared in the Russian regions of Kursk and Lipetsk, where Ukrainian forces were engaged in fierce fighting on Friday.

Friday’s drone assault added a complicated new dimension to the incursion, which dwarfs several previous cross-border raids conducted by anti-Moscow Russian volunteer fighters and a far-right militia operating under the command of Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate.

Some military analysts have questioned the timing of the Kursk operation and the redeployment of some of its elite units at a time when Ukraine’s army is already struggling to defend the frontline in the Donetsk region.

Elements of at least four Ukrainian mechanised and airborne brigades have taken part in the operation so far. In videos verified by the Financial Times and military analysts, they have been seen using US Stryker and German Marder fighting vehicles provided to Kyiv as part of military assistance packages worth billions of dollars.

US and German officials said the armoured vehicles inside Russia had not violated the conditions of their use, despite previous objections by Washington and other western governments to such weaponry being used within Russia over concerns that Moscow might escalate the war.

Gas prices in Russia rose sharply. Kursk contains a crucial transit corridor for gas supply to Europe.

As Kyiv pressed on with its incursion, Russia responded with an attack on a busy supermarket and post office in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kostyantynivka on Friday, which killed at least 12 civilians and injured 44 more, said President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and local authorities.

Officials published videos showing black smoke billowing from a destroyed store and first responders working to save shoppers trapped under debris. Another video showed badly wounded people sprawled on the pavement.

The overnight drone attack on Russia was carried out by Ukraine’s security service, the SBU, with the military and special forces early on Friday, a Ukrainian official with knowledge of operations inside Russia told the Financial Times.

The official said the Lipetsk air base — about 300km from the international border and just east of the latest fighting — was targeted “to destroy Russian aviation logistics so that the enemy does not have the opportunity to bomb Ukrainian cities with anti-aircraft missiles”.

Several warehouses filled with ammunition were detonated, the official said. Videos published on social media and geolocated by the Financial Times showed huge explosions reaching into the night sky.

The Ukrainian official claimed that up to 700 glide bombs stored in the warehouses were damaged or destroyed. Several dozen fighter jets, including Su-34, Su-35 and MiG-31 aircraft, along with military helicopters, were also at the air base, said the general staff of Ukraine’s army.

“Most of the planes stationed at the military airfield . . . did not have time to take off,” the Ukrainian official claimed. 

The FT could not immediately verify whether the bombs and aircraft had been damaged or destroyed. Russian military bloggers reported that no aircraft were damaged.

Videos shared on Russian Telegram channels showed lines of civilian vehicles stretching several kilometres fleeing east from the Lipetsk and Kursk regions.

The Ukrainian official said the Lipetsk attack was a follow-up to a Monday assault on the Morozovsk military base in Russia’s Rostov region that had destroyed anti-aircraft missiles and jet fighters. 

Ukraine’s general staff said its forces had also attacked Russian anti-aircraft missile divisions in the occupied territory of eastern Donetsk.

Those attacks came as Ukrainian forces pressed forward with their assault in the neighbouring Kursk region, where the Kremlin has lost control of roughly 350 sq km of territory, according to calculations by the FT and military analysts. 

Alexei Smirnov, the Kursk region’s acting governor, said the situation remained “difficult”. He said his government had declared a state of emergency, was still evacuating residents and was assisting those displaced.

Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters in Washington on Thursday that Ukraine was “taking action to protect themselves” and that the Biden administration did not see the incursion as escalatory.

Video and photo evidence suggested that Ukraine’s army has moved as deep as 35km into Russia from the international border, down a highway heading north-west. 

A video circulating on social media that the FT geolocated to a highway in Rylsk showed a destroyed column of Russian military vehicles transporting soldiers that stretched for hundreds of metres. The bodies of several troops are seen in the gruesome video.

A person with knowledge of the operation shared a video with the FT purporting to show a first-person-view (FPV) camera-equipped drone armed with an explosive as it crashed into the tail rotor of a Russian military helicopter.

The person said the SBU was behind the strike — the second Ukrainian FPV drone attack on a Russian helicopter this week. The person said both helicopters crashed as a result of the strikes, but the FT was unable to independently corroborate the claims.

On Friday afternoon, Russian state media aired footage of large convoys of military trucks transporting heavy weaponry towards the fight in Kursk.

Zelenskyy has not explicitly commented on the incursion, but thanked Ukrainian troops on Friday for “destroying the Russian occupiers, holding the frontline, and ensuring that Ukraine remains on the world map”.

“We are doing our best to provide our warriors with as many opportunities as possible to end this war as soon as possible with a just and lasting peace,” he said.

Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defence minister who advises the government, told the FT that Kyiv had planned the operation long in advance.

Zagorodnyuk said its aims included diverting Russian troops fighting elsewhere in Ukraine, as well as bringing the war home to Russians and discouraging them from supporting the war effort.

It also aimed to expose Russia’s weaknesses, including that it was incapable of protecting its own border, and to try to seize the initiative on the battlefield a year after an unsuccessful counteroffensive, and following months of Russian gains.

⁠Zagorodnyuk said the Ukrainian military was proving its ability to conduct “new tactics of combined arms operation” taught by western military trainers.

He said the aim was not to capture and hold Russian territory “for long”. “We don’t need Russian land,” he said. “We want them to fail on ours.”

Konrad Muzyka, a military analyst at Rochan Consulting, a Poland-based security group, said the Ukrainian operation could help its position in the war if it forced Russia to divert resources from eastern Donetsk and allowed Kyiv to maintain a presence in Russia’s Kursk region.

That presence might offer a better negotiating position in future, he said.

“If Ukrainian troops, however, are pushed back from the Russian territory without any tangible results with high losses and if Russians continue moving towards Pokrovsk [in Donetsk],” he said, then Ukraine’s top military leadership would be seen as having lost a huge gamble.

“There is no middle ground here. The operation is daring,” he said.

Ukraine separately claimed on Friday to have landed on the Kinburn Spit, a long strip of land jutting into the Black Sea that has been occupied by Russia since March 2022.

Video footage posted by Ukraine’s military intelligence showed troops landing by jet ski. “The Kinburn spit will be free, like all other temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine,” read an official post on Telegram. 

Additional reporting by Max Seddon in Riga, Anastasia Stognei in Tbilisi and Isobel Koshiw in Kyiv

When Vice President Harris introduced her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, to the nation this week, she ran through his biography – dad, military member, high school football coach, teacher – but lingered on one particular story about his time teaching and coaching.

“Coach Walz was approached by a student in his social studies class,” Harris said. “The young man was one of the first openly gay students at the school and was hoping to start a gay straight alliance at a time when acceptance was difficult to find for LGBTQ students. Tim knew the signal that it would send to have a football coach get involved. So he signed up to be the group’s faculty advisor.”

It was a story about Walz helping a kid out, but it was also a story about how, decades ago, Walz understood something that Democratic men are understanding en masse right now: not only that they have a gender, but that they can use their gender to send a political signal.

Building permission structures

There has been a remarkable trend since Kamala Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket: reaching out to men voters as men. There’s White Dudes for Harris, which held a recent organizing call, plus other virtual meetups from groups including Win With Black Men, Men for Harris and Dads for Kamala.

Often, gender-specific organizing is aimed at women – think Moms Demand Action, Moms for Liberty, or Women for Trump. And indeed, there have been an array of Harris organizing calls aimed at different groups of women.

But men as a group vote substantially more Republican than women, and men continue to be a big part of Donald Trump’s base. Indeed, the GOP (and particularly Trump’s GOP) has made itself the party of overt displays of masculinity.

So Democrats have been considering for years how to pull men to their side. In putting together these calls aimed at men, leaders of these groups say they are creating a permission structure for men to support a Democratic woman at the top of the ticket.

“If you have men who are recognizably successful as men within the traditional terms say, ‘We’re supporting Kamala Harris,’ then it makes it easier for men who are more self-conscious about that identification,” explained Jackson Katz, a writer and cofounder of the Young Men Research Initiative, a super PAC aimed at energizing young progressive men.

Bakari Sellers agrees. He was one organizer of the Win With Black Men call.

“The power of being able to go back to your barber shop and saying, ‘I was on a call with 50,000 men for Harris,’ that starts a totally different conversation,” Sellers said.

Just as Walz believed his status as a football coach would show students – likely, especially boys – that it was okay to support a gay peer, organizers hope that these groups help show men that they won’t be alone in supporting a Democratic woman of color.

Indeed, Walz himself – days before becoming the Democratic VP nominee – emphasized Harris’ gender and race on the White Dudes for Harris call while taking aim at Trump.

“How often in 100 days do you get to do something that’s going to impact generations to come? And how often in the world do you make that bastard wake up afterwards and know that a Black woman kicked his ass and sent him on the road?” Walz asked.

Men’s gender becomes visible

None of this would have been possible with Biden at the top of the ticket, according to Katz.

“Because Harris is a woman, her presence in the race makes gender visible in a way that it wasn’t with Biden,” Katz said. “You’ll see things like Men for Harris in a way that you wouldn’t have seen Men for Biden, because that would strike people as very odd and even redundant.”

But then, men are not a monolith. Different groups have different motivations.

For example, Sellers said that Black men feel a particular duty to show up for Harris.

“This is our time to show that we can stand up with her. Black women are always the backbone of the Democratic Party – we hear it, we hear it, and we hear it,” Sellers said. “And we’re like, ‘No, they are, but we’re here too.’ And we’re going to do everything we can.”

Meanwhile, Mark Linton, co-founder of Men for Harris, talked about making the pitch to white men using historic terms.

“This is that moment where white men are going to actually step up and say, this is actually our moment to really begin to turn a page and write a new chapter in America’s racial history,” Linton said.

Across all these groups, though, it’s clear that participants are thinking hard about their own identities, too.

“We’re here not only because we’re reimagining politics or reimagining the White House, but we’re reimagining what it means to be a dad,” said Mohan Sivaloganathan on a Dads for Kamala call. “And we’re retiring that tired stereotype of the dad who yells for everything but stands up for nothing.”

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Hargreaves Lansdown, the UK investment platform that pioneered selling stocks and funds directly to retail investors, has agreed to a £5.4bn takeover by a group of private equity firms.

The consortium, which is made up of CVC Capital Partners, Nordic Capital and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, has agreed to pay £11.40 in cash for each Hargreaves Lansdown share.

The price includes a final dividend of 30p for the last financial year. The deal has an “alternative” option for shareholders who want to stay invested in Hargreaves Lansdown, by allowing them to roll over their stake into the unlisted company.

The FTSE 100 business was founded in 1981 by Peter Hargreaves from his spare bedroom with Stephen Lansdown. The company, which floated in 2007, grew rapidly by offering individuals low-cost access to funds, as well as stocks and shares.

Hargreaves, who owns almost 20 per cent of the company, supports the deal and will sell 50 per cent of his stake while also keeping the rest in the business under its new owners. Hargreaves will receive £534mn from his share sale, according to people close to the process. Hargreaves declined to comment.

Lansdown has opted to sell his entire near-6 per cent holding. He told the Financial Times: “As with all such deals there is plenty of work to do, but I am pleased that we now have certainty and everyone can get on with their lives.

“[It’s] a bittersweet moment for me personally but I feel it is the right time to part company with Hargreaves Lansdown and concentrate on other projects.”

The option for shareholders to keep a portion of their stakes under the new owners has drawn criticism from some large shareholders because it would exclude investors who are unable to have holdings in unlisted companies.

The deal makes Hargreaves Lansdown the latest company to delist from the London market, adding to a stream of businesses picked off by private equity firms and other acquirers that view UK companies as relatively cheap.

The board “believes that the cash offer represents an attractive opportunity for HL Shareholders . . . which may not be achievable until the execution of the strategy is delivered over the medium to longer term”, said Alison Platt, chair of Hargreaves Lansdown.

The private equity groups said Hargreaves Lansdown “now requires substantial investment in an extensive technology-led transformation” to improve its “proposition and resilience” and to drive “the next phase” of growth and development.

Shares in the company have fallen from a peak of £24 in 2019 following criticism over the cost of its technology overhaul under previous management. Under Dan Olley, who became chief executive a year ago, Hargreaves Lansdown has refocused its efforts to improve its technology. The shares climbed 2 per cent to about £11 in early trading on Friday.

Hargreaves Lansdown made its name by selling investments directly to customers — rather than through financial advisers — and offering tax-efficient products such as Individual Savings Accounts and self-invested personal pensions. It oversees about £155bn of customer money and has amassed 1.9mn customers.

However, it came under fire for backing investment manager Neil Woodford, even as his fund started to come unstuck.

Analysts at Jefferies said although the offer represented a sizeable premium, they believed “there [was] greater value” in Hargreaves Lansdown over the medium term and expected shareholders to support the deal.

One analyst said that under private ownership, it would be easier for Hargreaves Lansdown to cut fees charged to customers, noting that the investment platform is more expensive than rivals in some cases. “Under public ownership, it’s hard to cut fees; under private, you can do that more easily,” he said.

Nordic Capital, a member of the consortium, previously invested in Nordnet, a similar digital investment site. Nordic Capital took the business private in 2016 and then relisted it in 2020.