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Russia has recaptured half of the territory it lost to Ukraine in Kursk, a region central to Volodymyr Zelensky’s plan to defeat Vladimir Putin.

A senior Russian commander from Chechnya said that an estimated 50,000 troops were pushing back Ukrainian forces, who either had to flee or “end up in the cauldron”.

“Approximately half of the territory that was occupied by the enemy has already been liberated,” said Major General Apty Alaudinov.

Well-connected Russian and Ukrainian military bloggers have been reporting since Saturday that Moscow’s troops have punched through sectors of Ukraine’s front lines in Kursk.

Mr Zelensky has insisted that the situation has stabilised but the US-based Institute for the Study of War, which holds staunchly pro-Ukraine views, said that it has seen “visual evidence” that Russia has recaptured 46 per cent of its territory in Kursk.

According to some commentators, seasonal rain has turned the ground to mud in the Kursk region, handing Russia an advantage because its forces use more tracked vehicles than Ukrainian troops do.

Boris Rozhin, a pro-Kremlin blogger, posted a video of Ukrainian soldiers pulling an armoured car out of a rain-soaked patch of forest next to a water-logged, mud-coated track.

“Ukrainian forces are doing a lot of whining about how they have a lot of wheeled vehicles, while Russian forces are betting on tracked vehicles,” he said.

The muddy season in Russia and Ukraine is called “rasputitsa” and is renowned for bogging down vehicles on tracks and fields, making travel slow-going.

Emil Kastehelmi, an open-source research analyst at the Finland-based Black Bird Group, also said that the terrain that Ukrainian forces were trying to defend in Kursk favoured the attacker.

“The area is mostly dominated by large open fields with a limited natural cover,” he said, describing Ukraine’s western flank. “Especially without proper fortifications, defending it can be difficult.”

By Mr Kastehelmi’s reckoning, Ukraine has lost at least a third of the territory that it had once held in the Kursk region.

Ukraine launched its daring incursion into Russia in August. Catching Russian soldiers by surprise, Ukrainian forces quickly captured a region around the town of Sudzha measuring roughly 450sq miles, half the size of Dorset.

The invasion boosted morale among Ukrainian civilians but some analysts warned that instead of drawing Russian forces away from the front line, it had weakened Ukraine’s defences.

Last month, George Beebe, the director of grand strategy at the US-based Quincy Institute, said the Kursk operation was already looking like a “blunder”.

He said: “There seems to be a great deal of scepticism about what this incursion is going to accomplish.”

Regardless, Mr Zelensky has made holding on to Ukraine’s Kursk salient central to his ‘Victory Plan’, which he presented to Sir Keir Starmer last week.

But Russian forces have accelerated their attacks along the front line in Donbas since Ukraine invaded Kursk, and on Tuesday pro-Russia officials in occupied Donetsk said that they had now captured two-thirds of Toretsk, a key front-line town with a pre-war population of 34,000 people.

In the northern section of the front line in east Ukraine, Ukrainian officials have also ordered the evacuation of civilians from the city of Kupyansk on the banks of the Oskil river because of Russian advances.

Oleg Sinegubov, the head of the Kharkiv region , said: “The military situation is deteriorating and we cannot ensure the heating season, the provision of electricity, and humanitarian assistance. The enemy is shelling critical infrastructure.”

A series of falsehoods and threats have swirled in the two weeks since Hurricane Helene tore through six states causing several hundred deaths, followed by Milton crashing into Florida on Wednesday.

The extent of the misinformation, which has been stoked by Donald Trump and his followers, has been such that it has stymied the ability to help hurricane-hit communities, according to the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).

Katie Nickolaou, a Michigan-based meteorologist, said that she and her colleagues have borne the brunt of much of these conspiracies, having received messages claiming there are category 6 hurricanes (there aren’t), that meteorologists or the government are creating and directing hurricanes (they aren’t) and even that scientists should be killed and radar equipment be demolished.

“I’ve never seen a storm garner so much misinformation, we have just been putting out fires of wrong information everywhere,” Nickolaou said.

“I have had a bunch of people saying I created and steered the hurricane, there are people assuming we control the weather. I have had to point out that a hurricane has the energy of 10,000 nuclear bombs and we can’t hope to control that. But it’s taken a turn to more violent rhetoric, especially with people saying those who created Milton should be killed.”

One post aimed at Nickolaou said: “Stop the breathing of those that made them and their affiliates.” She responded: “Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes. I can’t believe I just had to type that.”

“People have called me a plethora of curse words, people telling me to shut up and sit down, people who think it’s OK to take out Doppler radar because they think it is controlling the weather,” Nickolaou said. “It is eating up a lot of work and free time to deal with all of this. It’s very tiring.”

A wide range of misinformation has been spread as Helene and then Milton gathered pace in the Gulf of Mexico, such as claims spread by Trump that Fema had run out of cash for hurricane survivors because it has been given to illegal immigrants. Violent threats have also become common, with posts across TikTok, Facebook and X (formerly known as Twitter), alleging that Fema workers should be beaten or “arrested or shot or hung on sight”.

More outlandishly, several of Trump’s closest allies have baselessly asserted that the federal government is somehow controlling hurricanes. “Hurricane Helene was an ATTACK caused by Weather Manipulation,” claimed a video shared by Michael Flynn, a former national security advisor to Trump.

“Yes they can control the weather,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right congresswoman, wrote on X last week. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

This steep rise in falsehoods has drawn a sharp response from Joe Biden, who has blamed Trump for an “onslaught of lies” and told the former president to “get a life.”

“It’s beyond ridiculous,” Biden said of the claims being made around weather control. “It’s so stupid. It’s got to stop.”

Although humans can worsen hurricanes by burning fossil fuels, creating a hotter ocean and atmosphere that gives hurricanes more energy, they cannot create, control or steer individual storms. Also, Fema’s disaster relief fund for hurricane-hit communities is separate from and unaffected by the money spent on giving shelter to migrants.

But for meteorologists, the experiences around Helene and Milton are just an extreme continuation of a trend where the public is increasingly getting its information from extremist figures online rather than experts, according to Chris Gloninger, a former TV meteorologist and climate scientist who faced threats for talking about the climate crisis during his forecasts.

“The modern Republican party has an army of people who are on social media with huge followings who just disseminate this misinformation,” Gloninger said. “I’m seeing my former colleagues getting threats, I’m getting messages that we are steering hurricanes into red states. It’s mindblowing, I’ve never seen anything like this in any disaster.”

Gloninger said that meteorologists are “going to reach a point of burnout. What other profession are people targeted for simply doing their job? All we are trying to do is protect life and property during extreme weather.”

Xiao Chen*, who works in a private equity firm in China’s financial hub, Shanghai, says he is having a rough year.

For his first year in the job, he says he was paid almost 750,000 yuan ($106,200; £81,200). He was sure he would soon hit the million-yuan mark.

Three years on, he is earning half of what he made back then. His pay was frozen last year, and an annual bonus, which had been a big part of his income, vanished.

The “glow” of the industry has worn off, he says. It had once made him “feel fancy”. Now, he is just a “finance rat”, as he and his peers are mockingly called online.

China’s once-thriving economy, which encouraged aspiration, is now sluggish. The country’s leader, Xi Jinping, has become wary of personal wealth and the challenges of widening inequality.

Crackdowns on billionaires and businesses, from real estate to technology to finance, have been accompanied by socialist-style messaging on enduring hardship and striving for China’s prosperity. Even celebrities have been told to show off less online.

Loyalty to the Communist Party and country, people are told, now trumps the personal ambition that had transformed Chinese society in the last few decades.

Mr Chen's swanky lifestyle has certainly felt the pinch from this U-turn. He traded a holiday in Europe for a cheaper option: South East Asia. And he says he “wouldn’t even think about” buying again from luxury brands like “Burberry or Louis Vuitton”.

But at least ordinary workers like him are less likely to find themselves in trouble with the law. Dozens of finance officials and banking bosses have been detained, including the former chairman of the Bank of China.

The industry is under pressure. While few companies have publicly admitted it, pay cuts in banking and investment firms are a hot topic on Chinese social media.

Posts about falling salaries have generated millions of views in recent months. And hashtags like “changing career from finance” and “quitting finance” have gained more than two million views on the popular social media platform Xiaohongshu.

Some finance workers have been seeing their income shrink since the start of the pandemic but many see one viral social media post as a turning point.

In July 2022, a Xiaohongshu user sparked outrage after boasting about her 29-year-old husband’s 82,500-yuan monthly pay at top financial services company, China International Capital Corporation.

People were stunned by the huge gap between what a finance worker was getting paid and their own wages. The average monthly salary in the country's richest city, Shanghai, was just over 12,000 yuan.

It reignited a debate about incomes in the industry that had been started by another salary-flaunting online user earlier that year.

Those posts came just months after Xi called for “common prosperity” - a policy to narrow the growing wealth gap.

In August 2022, China’s finance ministry published new rules requiring firms to “optimise the internal income distribution and scientifically design the salary system”.

The following year, the country's top corruption watchdog criticised the ideas of “finance elites” and the “only money matters” approach, making finance a clearer target for the country’s ongoing anti-corruption campaign.

The changes came in a sweeping but discreet way, according to Alex*, a manager at a state-controlled bank in China’s capital, Beijing.

“You would not see the order put into written words - even if there is [an official] document it’s certainly not for people on our level to see. But everyone knows there is a cap on it [salaries] now. We just don’t know how much the cap is.”

Alex says employers are also struggling to deal with the pace of the crackdown: “In many banks, the orders could change unexpectedly fast.”

“They would issue the annual guidance in February, and by June or July, they would realise that the payment of salaries has exceeded the requirement. They then would come up with ways to set up performance goals to deduct people’s pay.”

Mr Chen says his workload has shrunk significantly as the number of companies launching shares on the stock market has fallen. Foreign investment has decreased in China, and domestic businesses have also turned cautious - because of the crackdowns and weak consumption.

In the past his work often involved new projects that would bring money into his firm. Now his days are mostly filled with chores like organising the data from his previous projects.

“The morale of the team has been very low, the discussion behind the bosses backs are mostly negative. People are talking what to do in three to five years.”

It’s hard to estimate if people are leaving the industry in large numbers, although there have been some layoffs. Jobs are also scarce in China now, so even a lower-paying finance job is still worth keeping.

But the frustration is evident. A user on Xiaohongshu compared switching jobs to changing seats - except, he wrote, “if you stand up you might find your seat is gone.”

Mr Chen says that it's not just the authorities that have fallen out of love with finance workers, it's Chinese society in general.

“We are no longer wanted even for a blind date. You would be told not to go once they hear you work in finance.”

*The names of the finance workers have been changed to protect their identities.