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VLADIMIR Putin’s prized golden goose – Russia’s oil empire – has become a sitting duck, and it’s Ukraine’s drones that are pulling the trigger.

In the latest episode of Battle Plans Exposed, military intelligence expert Philip Ingram MBE lays bare how Kyiv has opened a devastating new front in the war in the oilfields, refineries and pipelines that bankroll Putin’s invasion.

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“This is the oil war,” Ingram says.

“It’s a highly strategic, calculated campaign to cripple the engine of Putin’s war.”

Watch the latest episode on The Sun’s YouTube channel here…

For decades, Russia’s vast energy reserves paid for everything from tanks and cruise missiles to soldiers’ salaries and propaganda handouts.

Before the invasion, energy exports made up around 40 per cent of the Kremlin’s budget.

Even under sanctions, oil and gas still bring in 30 per cent of Russia’s income.

The episode shows how Ukraine has zeroed in on this “river of oil money” with pinpoint strikes hundreds of miles inside Russian territory.

Long-range drones have torched colossal refineries, exploded pumping stations and set storage tanks ablaze – systematically dismantling Moscow’s refining capacity.

Footage of Rosneft’s Ryazan refinery erupting into flames after a single drone strike captures the scale of the destruction.

“This isn’t a military base on the border,” Ingram warns.

“This is a core piece of Russia’s national infrastructure – hundreds of miles from Ukraine.”

What makes these attacks so devastating is their precision.

Ingram explains that the real targets aren’t the giant tanks but the refinery’s processing units – “the heart of the refinery,” where crude is split into diesel for tanks, jet fuel for fighters and gasoline for the home front.

Knock one of these units out, and the entire facility is useless for months, even years.

The episode shows how Ukraine has already knocked out at least 12 per cent of Russia’s refining capacity – stripping away over 600,000 barrels a day.

That’s billions in lost revenue that can’t be pumped into Putin’s war chest.

The impact is twofold. First, it chokes the Russian military itself: “No diesel, and tanks don’t move.

“No jet fuel, and fighters are grounded,” Ingram says.

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Second, it hits ordinary Russians – with fuel shortages, soaring prices and the chilling sight of their industrial heartland burning.

The Kremlin’s response? Denial, spin and panic.

Moscow has been forced to ban fuel exports for six months, sacrificing vital revenue just to stop unrest at home.

“Putin’s greatest fear,” Ingram says, “is the Russian people rising up.”

This is asymmetric warfare at its most ruthless – cheap Ukrainian drones inflicting billion-dollar wounds on the Kremlin.

The episode shows how the campaign has shattered Russia’s aura of invulnerability, exposed its sprawling oil empire as a fatal weakness, and brought the war crashing into the lives of ordinary Russians.

And as Ingram puts it: “It proves that in modern warfare, the most effective battle plans aren’t always about brute force on the tactical frontline, but about finding your enemy’s single point of failure – and striking it again and again with unrelenting precision.”

It comes as Ukraine claims to have turned the tide on the eastern front in a brutal counter-offensive.

Kyiv’s top general Oleksandr Syrskyi said his troops had clawed back around 60 square miles since August, with Putin’s men retreating from a further 70 square miles north of bomb-blitzed Pokrovsk.

He boasted Russian forces had paid a horrifying price — 1,500 killed, another thousand wounded and 12 main battle tanks blown to pieces.

“Control has been restored in seven settlements and nine more have been cleared of enemy sabotage and reconnaissance groups,” Syrskyi declared, claiming nearly 165 square kilometres were liberated and almost 180 cleared of Russian saboteurs.

The breakthrough follows a shaky summer where Russian “saboteurs” punched six miles through Ukrainian lines overnight, threatening to cut supply roads.

But Ukraine has regrouped and is now pushing them back, Syrskyi insisting: “In the past 24 hours alone the enemy have lost 65 servicemen, 43 of them killed in action, along with 11 pieces of equipment.”

The destroyed kit ranges from tanks to artillery, drones and even a quad bike used by desperate Russian troops.

Russia has tried to claw back the narrative, claiming it captured a hamlet south of Pokrovsk — a claim Ukraine flatly denies.

Instead, Kyiv points to wrecked Russian armour littering the battlefield and insists the Kremlin’s army is being bled dry.

The fighting comes as Volodymyr Zelensky prepares to meet Donald Trump on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.

Ukraine’s war leader is set to press the US president for tougher sanctions if Putin refuses to come to the table.

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Trump — who once called Putin a “genius” — admitted the dictator had “let him down”.

“I thought this war would be one of the easiest to solve because of my relationship with Putin. But he has really let me down,” he said during his visit to Britain.

But Britain’s spy chief Sir Richard Moore has poured cold water on any idea of a quick peace.

In a message aimed squarely at Trump, he said: “I have seen absolutely no evidence that President Putin has any interest in a negotiated  peace short of Ukrainian capitulation.”

He warned the world not to be duped by the Kremlin tyrant: “We should not believe him or credit him with strength he does not have.”

Moore added Russia was grinding forward “at a snail’s pace and horrendous cost” — and that Putin had “bitten off more than he can chew.”

He lauded Ukraine’s resistance and heaped praise on Zelensky, saying: “My admiration for him is unbounded,” while savaging Putin for plunging Russia into “long term decline” where he invests only in “missiles, munitions and morgues.”

The warning came days after Russia’s indiscriminate blitz killed three civilians in Zaporizhzhia — two women aged 40 and 79 and a man of 77 — even as Ukrainian forces notched up new gains and unleashed fresh revenge strikes on Russian soil.

Last month, Kyiv marked Independence Day with a wave of drone attacks crippling Russian energy sites and claimed to have wiped out three of the “Butchers of Bucha” in precision bombings in occupied Luhansk.

The Russian soldiers had been accused of taking part in the notorious 2022 massacre where hundreds of civilians were executed, tortured and raped as Putin’s troops stormed towards Kyiv.

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AXA Health physiotherapist Bethany Tomlinson has warned plane plassengers to stop adopting a common sitting position when aboard flights due to the health risks

A physiotherapist has warned against adopting a common sitting position when settling in for a flight.

When confronted with the unforgiving, padding-light seats on offer on budget airlines such as Ryanair, easyJet and Wizz Air, getting comfy is no mean feat. Particularly when dealing with a seat in front that looms just centimetres away from your knees.

According to AXA Health physiotherapist Bethany Tomlinson, crossing your legs is not the way to go. While it may feel like a polite way to avoid a spot of man-spreading that embraces some of the European sophistication of the destination you may be heading to, Bethany warns that it can lead to joint issues.

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“Avoid crossing your legs in your plane seat as this will impact blood flow and increase the risk of developing deep vein thrombosis (DVT),” she told Mail Online.

DVT is the formation of a thrombus in a deep vein, which partially or completely obstructs blood flow in that vessel. Travel-related DVT can occur as a result of prolonged immobility during long-distance travel. This results from a combination of factors, including prolonged cramped sitting and seat-edge pressure.

The annual incidence of DVT is estimated to be about 1 in 1000. However, the risk of developing DVT is increased two to fourfold after long-haul flights of more than four hours, according to NICE. Most clots are small and do not cause symptoms.

For healthy people, the risk is estimated to be one event in 4,656 to 6,000 flights over four hours in length.

One of the best ways to lower your risk of DVT is to keep your legs elevated and choose different relaxing positions. Bethany suggests keeping your legs slightly elevated using the footrest on the seat in front of you.

This can help lower the risk of DVT, while also decreasing the chance that you’ll arrive on holiday with stiff knees – something that blights the lives of one in three Brits.

The pros at Netflights have also shared their top tips for making that long-haul journey a tad more bearable. One of their key recommendations is to rise from your seat and take a stroll every one to three hours. Make a deliberate effort to move about frequently during your flight.

Even something as simple as walking to the loo or standing up for a stretch can help keep you feeling sprightly and prevent stiffness, which is particularly vital on flights exceeding four hours. Stretching is another crucial aspect, and you can do this right from your seat. Gently roll your neck from side to side, rotate your shoulders forwards and backwards, and carefully twist your spine.

Digha, India – On a hot and sultry June afternoon, Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of India’s West Bengal state, swept a sun-scorched road to make way for a towering chariot in Digha, a tourist town on the country’s Bay of Bengal coast.

The moment, captured by dozens of cameras and broadcast widely on television, on June 27, marked the launch of the eastern state’s first-ever government-sponsored Rath Yatra (“chariot festival”) to celebrate the construction of a sprawling temple complex built to house the Hindu god, Lord Jagannath.

First announced in December 2018, and completed in May this year, the Digha temple has been pitched by Banerjee and her governing Trinamool Congress (TMC) party as West Bengal’s alternative to the more popular Jagannath Temple in neighbouring Odisha state’s Puri town, about 350km (217 miles) away.

Built in the 12th century, the temple in Puri is one of Hinduism’s four major pilgrimage sites, and home to an annual 800-year-old chariot festival, a weeklong event attended by tens of thousands of devotees. To kick-start the festival, descendants of the erstwhile Puri kingdom’s rulers symbolically sweep the chariot path, like their ancestors in power once did.

At Digha, that task was performed by Banerjee, neither the descendant of an emperor, nor a priest, raising questions about whether the construction of the temple was about faith or politics, a year before one of India’s most politically significant states votes for its next government.

Move aimed to counter BJP?

West Bengal, home to more than 91 million people, is India’s fourth most-populous state. Nearly 30 percent of its population is Muslim.

For decades, the state was also home to the world’s longest-serving elected communist government, until a feisty Banerjee – leading the centrist TMC party she founded in 1998 – unseated the Left Front coalition in 2011.

Since then, it is the Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, that has emerged as the TMC’s main rival in West Bengal. From winning just two parliamentary seats in 2014, the year Modi stormed to power, the BJP last year won 12 of the state’s 42 seats. The TMC won 29.

In the 2021 state assembly election, Banerjee’s TMC and its allies won a landslide 216 of 292 seats, while the BJP-led coalition won 77. It was also the first election in which the Left or the Indian National Congress, the main opposition in parliament, could not win a single seat in a state both had previously governed.

As the political landscape changed in West Bengal, so did its players.

For almost a decade now, the BJP and its ideological parent, the far-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), have used Hindu festivals such as Ram Navami to expand their footprint in the state, often organising large processions that have on occasion passed, provocatively, through areas with large Muslim populations, with participants carried sticks, swords and tridents.

The BJP has also repeatedly accused the TMC of “minority appeasement”, in essence alleging that the party favours Muslim interests over the concerns of Hindu voters.

The TMC appears to be responding to that shift in politics in kind. In recent rallies, its leaders have been seen chanting “Jai Jagannath” (Hail Jagannath) to counter the BJP’s “Jai Shri Ram” (Hail Lord Ram), a slogan that, for millions of Hindus in India, is more a war-cry against Muslims and other minorities than a political chant.

“Now no one will say Jai Shri Ram. Everyone will say Jai Jagannath,” TMC leader Arup Biswas said in Digha in April.

To political scientist Ranabir Samaddar, the TMC’s temple politics is evidence of a brewing battle over the identity of Hinduism itself.

“If you agree Hindu society is not monolithic, then it’s natural that Hindus who reject the majoritarian version will assert a different understanding,” said Samaddar, who is a distinguished chair in migration and forced migration studies at the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group.

He argued that moves like Mamata’s represent a deeper social and cultural contest. “This is not a simple secularism-versus-communalism binary,” he said. “It is a protest against the idea that there is only one kind of Hinduism.”

For years, the BJP’s political opponents have struggled to craft a response to its vision of creating a Hindu-first state without being put on the defensive by Modi’s party, which portrays them as intrinsically anti-Hindu.

The Digha temple, Samaddar suggested, attempts to break that BJP stranglehold.

“As the dominant narrative becomes more rigid, insisting on a singular, state-aligned Hindu identity, the counter-response is also happening within the framework of Hindu identity,” he said. “It’s a dialogue, a form of social argument about plurality.

“This is also an assertion of rights. A claim to say, ‘We too are Hindus, but we won’t let you define what Hinduism is.’ These are attempts to break the monopoly of certain institutions and groups who have long claimed to speak for all Hindus. That’s what makes this moment significant.”

Bengal’s shifting religious terrain

Originally introduced by the government as a “cultural centre”, the Digha shrine soon evolved into a 65-metre-tall (213 feet) temple, spread over 8 hectares (20 acres) and costing the state exchequer more than $30m.

“This temple will add a new feather to the state’s cap. Digha will grow into an international tourist attraction. This will serve as a place of harmony. The sea adds a special charm to Digha. If it becomes a place of pilgrimage, more tourists will come,” Trinamool chief Banerjee had said during the structure’s inauguration on April 30. She will seek a fourth straight term as chief minister next year.

But the project has faced pushback.

When the Digha temple opened earlier this year, the BJP’s parliamentarian from Puri, Sambit Patra, declared: “There is only one Jagannath Dham in the world, and it is in Puri.” A dham is a shrine in Sanskrit.

On June 27, the BJP’s most prominent Bengal leader, Suvendu Adhikari, called the temple a “tourist attraction, not a spiritual site”.

“Puri Dham will remain Puri Dham. Mamata Banerjee is a fake Hindu. Temples can’t be built using government funds. It is a cultural centre, not a temple. Don’t mislead the people of Bengal,” he said.

He argued that Hindu temples in independent India have been made using donations – including the Ram temple in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya, built on the ruins of the 16th-century Babri Mosque that Hindu zealots had torn down in 1992. “Hindus make temples on their own. No government fund was used to build the Ram temple. Hindus across the world funded it.”

Priests at the Puri temple were furious too. The temple’s chief servitor, Bhabani Das Mohapatra, called the Digha complex a “crime by Mamata Banerjee”, and accused the West Bengal state government of “arrogantly violating scriptural norms”. Ramakrishna Das Mahapatra, a senior servitor from Puri who attended the Digha consecration, was suspended by the Puri temple authority.

‘Nobody invited us’

The criticism of the Digha temple is not limited to political opponents and representatives of the Digha temple.

As hundreds of people watched the June 27 consecration from behind security barricades, a 64-year-old local and retired government employee, Manik Sarkar, said he was frustrated.

“All the cost is coming from taxpayers like us,” he told Al Jazeera. “But nobody invited us. The government hospital nearby doesn’t even have proper equipment, and they’re spending millions lighting up the temple.”

Another resident, Ashima Devi, said she was anxious about the daily electricity bills. “Lakhs of rupees, every night,” she said. “Unemployment is already so high here. Thousands of government school teachers who lost their jobs because of corruption – they had cleared the exams fairly. Why isn’t this government fixing that? What will happen to them?”

She was referring to a $70m public school hiring scam recently unearthed by India’s top financial crimes office, the Enforcement Directorate, for which the TMC’s former education minister is now jailed.

One man in the crowd, who called himself a TMC supporter, interjected. “Tourism will grow,” he said.

But Sarkar pushed back: “All the hotels [in Digha] are owned by outsiders. What benefit are you talking about?”

‘A politics that centres temples’

Historian Tapati Guha Thakurta said that the state’s involvement in temple building ought to be seen as a part of a larger arc in India’s modern journey.

“There’s been a major slide – from the modern, secular model to a politics that centres temples,” she said.

After India’s independence, the state actively supported projects like the reconstruction of the Somnath temple in Gujarat, backed by leaders like Vallabhbhai Patel — the man credited with bringing together 500 princely states into the Indian union using a mix of allurement and coercion.

But independent India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, opposed state support for the Somnath rebuilding, she noted.

“He stayed away. That moment showed how contested religion was, even within the Nehruvian vision of the state,” Guha Thakurta said to Al Jazeera. “That moment was emblematic. It showed that even at the dawn of Indian secularism, religion was never fully out of the frame.”

Nawsad Siddique, the sole state legislator from the Indian Secular Front, a coalition of the opposition Left groups and Congress party, called the Digha temple a “blurring of governance and faith”. Speaking to reporters on July 10, in Kolkata, he said, “We don’t have jobs. Our youth are migrating. Our schools are crumbling. And we’re building mega temples?”

Guha Thakurta recalled the deliberate separation of state and religion under 34 years of Left government.

“Our generation grew up under a firewall between religion and the state,” said Guha Thakurta, whose research into Durga Puja – the celebration of Goddess Durga that is the pre-eminent annual festival for Bengalis – helped secure a UNESCO intangible cultural heritage tag for the festival.

At the time, Marxist cultural elites dismissed even Durga Puja as “opo-sanskriti” or a degenerate ritual, to be merely tolerated.

That changed post-2011, when Banerjee first came to power.

“From $100 in grants, it’s now $1,200,” she said, referring to state funds for Durga Puja committees. “Durga Puja is now a state event. And this model is spreading.”

“We’re sitting on a volcano about to erupt. That’s all I’ll say.”

A former flight attendant and TikTok creator has shared a warning about the window seat

Cabin crew understand the realities of air travel better than most passengers. Their knowledge stems from years of hands-on experience rather than just theoretical training, which is why their advice about flying should be taken seriously. When a flight attendant reveals what they personally avoid doing whilst aboard an aircraft, it’s definitely worth listening.

Many travellers book their preferred seats well in advance, hoping for a more pleasant journey. Most flyers opt for either window seats to lean against or aisle positions for additional leg room, but one former flight attendant has issued a stark warning about choosing the window spot, reports the Express.

TikTok user and former cabin crew member Cierra Mistt has raised serious concerns about window seats and explained her reasoning.

Breeding ground for bacteria

Cierra explained: “While it is true that cleaners do come on most after passengers are done getting off the plane, they don’t do a deep clean like you might think they do.

“In fact, they only did that during Covid, and the only thing they really deep-cleaned was the tray tables and seatbelts. Nowadays, it’s mostly just to tidy up and getting the trash off the floor.”

Noting that some carriers provide sanitising wipes when passengers board, she continued: “If I were you, instead of wiping down the tray tables and seatbelts that they just cleaned, I would use that wipe to clean off the window that you’re next to, because just like the bathroom floor, those things have never been cleaned.”

Taking to the comments section of the video, most viewers urged others to always pack cleaning wipes to sanitise the window area.

One viewer remarked: “I can’t believe they get away with not cleaning anything! That is horrible!”. Another commented: “I always clean the window and the head seat. Sometimes looks greasy.”

A third confirmed: ” I can verify this. They didn’t even remove the melted chocolate from my seat and tray left by the previous passenger before I sat down. I had to sort it myself.”

Someone else explained: “You have less than seven minutes to clean a whole plane. Sometimes, only two people are there to clean a plane.”

Defending the airlines, another viewer countered: “They do a deep clean and search EVERY single night, including disinfecting everything with cleaner.”

According to Aviation Job Search, standard cleaning takes place between flights, whilst aircraft also undergo regular thorough cleaning to uphold high hygiene standards.

These comprehensive sessions involve scrubbing cabin walls, wiping down overhead compartments, and clearing out air vents. Seats and cushions are meticulously hoovered and disinfected to eliminate any concealed grime or debris.

Is the window seat actually the safest?

Specialists at Travel & Leisure disclosed that choosing a window seat might be the most effective method to avoid catching illnesses from other travellers.

They explained: “A 2018 study said that window seats are best because they’re the most isolated (other than in certain ultra-luxe first-class mini cabins).

“Window-side passengers are seated next to just one passenger, with seats separating them from the people in front and behind. Most importantly, they are furthest from the aisle, where crew and other passengers can frequently pass by.”

Additional studies also discovered that travellers positioned nearer to the aisle are more prone to standing up mid-flight, boosting their likelihood of coming into contact with bacteria whilst moving throughout the aircraft.

Given the research available, it appears the window seat offers the greatest protection against picking up bugs, though it remains wise to take precautions and clean your space before departure.