Volgograd burning again and a new Ukrainian missile: Jerome Starkey's roundup takes off
His look at a week of deep strikes inside Russia led a day when four of The Sun's Ukraine videos ran far ahead of the paper's usual start.
The SunStory of Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 628,554 views a day, 14 times a normal first day on this channel (44,728).
Ukraine's GIANT Russia strikes force Putin to admit failiure as Zelensky unveils lethal new missile
The Sun's defense editor, Jerome Starkey, had a lot to fit into one report. As the description lays it out, Volgograd went up in flames for the third time, and strikes reached Samara, Perm, Rostov-on-Don, Ulyanovsk and an ammunition depot at Krasnozavodsk outside Moscow. Ukraine also used a new ballistic missile, the FP7, built by Fire Point, the maker best known for its Flamingo cruise missile. The report then turns to the 3rd Army Corps near Lyman, to Putin's admission that the deep strikes have hurt Russia's economy, and to Russian strikes on the National Academy of Sciences in Kyiv and the Pivdennyi bridge.
The video went up under the title "Ukraine's GIANT Russia strikes force Putin to admit failiure as Zelensky unveils lethal new missile" and passed 280,000 views in about seven hours. A new Sun video usually ends its whole first day well under 50,000. The comments came in faster than the views: in those seven hours the video drew roughly three times the comments a typical upload collects in a full day. Many of them come from Canada and Australia, and a long thread is about a captured armored vehicle sent toward Russian lines as an unmanned battering ram.
The paper's other Ukraine coverage from the same day ran well ahead of its usual start too. Former tank commander Hamish de Bretton-Gordon explained Ukraine's fast tank raids, short footage showed explosions at the Krasnozavodsk site, and independent journalist Caolan Robertson reported from Zaporizhzhia, 20 kilometers from Europe's largest nuclear power plant. A clip of Putin's remark about a gun that "must go off" drew far more comments than views. The Telegraph is also having a busy few days.
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- Channel
- The Sun
- Subscribers
- 6,540,000
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 11,258,713
- Channel views, pace per day
- 2,030,461 (on a normal day: 1,433,488)
- Video published
- October 2, 2026
- Video views so far
- 288,446 (less than a day online)
- Video views, pace per day
- 628,554
The numbers
Starkey's report had the fastest start in a day of strong Ukraine videos on the channel.
💡 Test your knowledge
Volgograd, hit again in this week's strikes, was known by which name from 1925 to 1961?
The city on the Volga was renamed Stalingrad in 1925 and became Volgograd in 1961, during Khrushchev's de-Stalinization.
