Russia-Ukraine war: shelling forces Kherson hospitals to evacuate as UN warns millions plunged into hardship – as it happened

It’s nearly 9pm in Kyiv. Here’s where we stand:

• Much of Ukraine remained without electricity, heat and water two days after a devastating series of Russian missile attacks against civilian infrastructure. The Kyiv mayor, Vitaly Klitschko, said 60% of households in the city of 3 million had no power, and there were rolling blackouts around the country. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said basic utilities were gradually being restored, but there were problems with water supplies in 15 regions.

• The EU will intensify efforts to provide Ukraine with support to restore and maintain power and heating, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said. In a statement after a phone call with Zelenskiy, she said the EU would provide 200 medium-sized transformers and a large autotransformer from Lithuania, a medium-sized autotransformer from Latvia and 40 heavy generators from the EU reserve in Romania.

• The UN high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, said Russian strikes on critical infrastructure had killed at least 77 people since October. Since early October, Russian forces have launched missiles roughly once a week with the aim of destroying the Ukrainian energy grid, crippling the country’s power and heat supply.

• Hospital patients are being evacuated from Kherson city because of bombardment by Russian forces, said the governor of the region, Yaroslav Yanushevych. The recently recaptured city in the south of the country faced heavy shelling last night.

• Russian strikes damaged a hospital in Zaporizhzhia overnight, the region’s governor, Oleksandr Starukh, said. The attacks come as Russia’s latest barrage shut down all of Ukraine’s nuclear plants – one of which is located in Zaporizhzhia – for the first time in 40 years.

• All nuclear power stations in the government-controlled part of Ukraine are up and running again and connected to the main electricity grid, the country’s energy provider, Ukrenergo, has said. The UN’s nuclear watchdog confirmed that Ukraine’s four nuclear power plants had been reconnected to the national power grid after completely losing off-site power earlier this week.

• Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has met a handpicked cadre of mothers of soldiers fighting in Ukraine in a carefully staged encounter meant to calm public anger over mobilisation. While dozens of ordinary mothers have gone public saying they were snubbed by the Kremlin, Putin sat down with a former government official, the mother of a senior military and police official from Chechnya, and other women active in pro-war NGOs financed by the state.

• The Russian war effort in Ukraine is characterised by confusion among reservists over eligibility for service and inadequate training and equipment, according to the UK’s Ministry of Defence. In its daily update, the MoD said some reservists were having to serve with “serious chronic health conditions” since they were called up during Vladimir Putin’s announcement of a “partial mobilisation”.

• Armenia has asked the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to chair peace talks with Azerbaijan in a fresh challenge to Vladimir Putin’s increasingly loose grip on Russia’s regional allies in the wake of the war in Ukraine. The snub from a traditional ally to Putin comes immediately on the back of his disastrous summit with six former Soviet states.

• EU diplomats are meeting this evening to resume talks on whether they can finalise a deal on a price level to cap Russian oil exports, according to a report by Bloomberg. European governments have failed so far to reach a deal on the price level for Russian oil. A G7 proposal for a cap of $65-$70 a barrel is seen as far too high by some, and too low by others.

• Germany’s Bundestag is planning to pass a resolution declaring the starvation of millions of Ukrainians under Joseph Stalin a genocide. The resolution, which will be jointly brought to the vote next week by the three governing parties and conservative opposition leaders, aims to serve as a warning to Moscow as Ukraine faces a potential hunger crisis this winter.

• Britain’s foreign secretary, James Cleverly, travelled to Kyiv on Thursday to meet the Ukrainian leadership and promise the UK’s support for as long as it takes. In his first visit to Ukraine since his appointment as foreign secretary, Cleverly presented a package of support including money for the reconstruction of schools, ambulances, the victims of sexual violence, and grain sales to the world’s poorest markets, such as Sudan and Yemen.

• Two Swedish brothers, one who worked for the country’s security police and armed forces, went on trial in Stockholm today accused of spying for Russian intelligence between 2011 and 2021. Payam Kia, 35, and his brother Peyman Kia, 42, could face life sentences if found guilty.

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has met mothers of Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine.

Around a table laid with tea, cakes and bowls of fresh berries, he told them he shared in their suffering and the entire Russian leadership understood the pain of those who had lost their sons.

Advocates of soldiers’ families and rights groups have said Putin snubbed them for the meeting.

Valentina Melnikova, who has been an advocate for soldiers’ families for more than three decades, told the Guardian that “they didn’t invite us and we of course don’t want to go”.

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A Swedish court has ordered a man to be remanded in custody on suspicion of illegal intelligence activities against Sweden and a foreign power.

The man, who has Russian roots, was arrested by police on Tuesday morning after a raid on a house in an affluent Stockholm suburb, Reuters reports. The suspected crimes were said to have taken place between July 2014 until the day of the arrest.

Prosecutors said a second person arrested in Tuesday’s raid had been released but remained a suspect. Both have denied any wrongdoing.

The UN’s nuclear watchdog has confirmed that Ukraine’s four nuclear power plants have been reconnected to the national power grid after completely losing off-site power earlier this week.

In a statement, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said it had been informed by Ukraine that its Rivne, South Ukraine and Khmelnytskyi plants had been reconnected. Power had also been restored to the Chernobyl site, it said.

Ukraine’s nuclear energy firm, Energoatom, said on Wednesday that a number of units were shut down at the Pivdennoukrainsk nuclear plant in southern Ukraine because of a loss of power during Russian airstrikes.

Units were also not operating at the Khmelnytskyi plant in western Ukraine, according to a local official.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has also tweeted about his call with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and said the pair discussed cooperation on ensuring energy stability for his country.

The EU will intensify efforts to provide Ukraine with support to restore and maintain power and heating, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has said after a phone call with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

In a statement, she said the EU was preparing the delivery to Ukraine “as quickly as possible” of large donations from the bloc’s member states and from the commission’s reserves.

She said the EU would provide 200 medium-sized transformers and a large autotransformer from Lithuania, a medium-sized autotransformer from Latvia and 40 heavy generators from the EU reserve in Romania.

Each of these generators “can provide uninterrupted power to a small to medium-sized hospital”, she said.

She added that she expressed the EU’s “full solidarity” with the Ukrainian people at the hands of Vladimir Putin’s “deliberate and barbaric bombing” of the country’s civilian infrastructure during her call with Zelenskiy.

Two Swedish brothers, one who worked for the country’s security police and armed forces, went on trial in Stockholm today accused of spying for Russian intelligence between 2011 and 2021.

Payam Kia, 35, and his brother Peyman Kia, 42, were detained last year on suspicion of providing the Russian intelligence agency, GRU, with classified information over a period of a decade.

Prosecutors say the older brother is also charged with gross unauthorised handling of secret information. According to Swedish media, he previously worked for the Office for Special Information Gathering (KSI), the most secret section of the military secret service.

Both men have previously denied all allegations.

In his opening statement, the prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist told the court:

This case is unique in many ways … We haven’t had a trial like this in more than 20 years.

He said the information obtained, transmitted and divulged was “extremely sensitive material”, while his co-prosecutor Per Lindqvist said the sharing of it could be “detrimental to Sweden’s national security”.

The trial is expected to run until at least 12 December and will mostly take place behind closed doors because of national security concerns. The brothers could face life sentences if found guilty.

In a separate case, Swedish police this week arrested two people on suspicion of espionage.

EU diplomats are meeting this evening to resume talks on whether they can finalise a deal on a price level to cap Russian oil exports, sources have told Bloomberg.

European governments have failed so far to reach a deal on the price level for Russian oil. A G7 proposal for a cap of $65-$70 a barrel is seen as far too high by some, and too low by others.

Six of the EU’s 27 member countries opposed the price cap level proposed by the G7, Reuters cited diplomats as saying on Thursday.

Vladimir Putin has met a handpicked cadre of mothers of soldiers fighting in Ukraine for a carefully staged meeting meant to calm public anger over mobilisation.

While dozens of ordinary mothers have gone public saying they were snubbed by the Kremlin, Putin sat down with a former government official, the mother of a senior military and police official from Chechnya, and other women active in pro-war NGOs financed by the state.

The Guardian has managed to confirm the identifies of at least three of the women who met with Putin on Friday in a highly publicised meeting at his residence in Novo-Ogaryovo on the outskirts of Moscow.

View image in fullscreen

None of the women are critical of the war against Ukraine and several have publicly sought to quell fears about the poor treatment, inadequate training and dangers faced by Russian troops being mustered to be sent to the front.

Yet the very fact of the meeting showed that the Kremlin is worried about the perception of its mobilisation at home.

“It is clear that life is more complicated and diverse than what is shown on TV screens or even on the internet – you can’t trust anything there at all, there are a lot of all sorts of fakes, deception, lies,” Putin told the women, who were seated around a large, oval table.

This is why we have gathered with you, that’s why I proposed this meeting, because I wanted to listen to you first-hand.

One of the women sitting next to Putin was Olesya Shigina, an ultra-conservative Russian poet, film-maker and activist who recently travelled to the Donbas region to direct a pro-war film featuring Russian troops.

Read the full story by my colleagues Andrew Roth and Pjotr Sauer here:

It’s just past 6pm in Kyiv. Here’s where things stand:

• Much of Ukraine remained without electricity, heat and water two days after a devastating series of Russian missile attacks against the country’s civilian infrastructure. The Kyiv mayor, Vitaly Klitschko, said 60% of households in the city of 3 million had no power, and there were rolling blackouts around the country. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said basic utilities were gradually being restored, but there were problems with water supplies in 15 regions.

• The UN high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, said Russian strikes on critical infrastructure had killed at least 77 people since October. Since early October, Russian forces have launched missiles roughly once a week with the aim of destroying the Ukrainian energy grid, crippling the country’s power and heat supply.

• Hospital patients are being evacuated from Kherson city because of bombardment by Russian forces, the governor of the region, Yaroslav Yanushevych, said. The recently recaptured city in the south of the country faced heavy shelling last night.

• Russian strikes have damaged a hospital in Zaporizhzhia overnight, the region’s governor, Oleksandr Starukh, said. The attacks come as Russia’s latest barrage shut down all of Ukraine’s nuclear plants – one of which is located in Zaporizhzhia – for the first time in 40 years.

• All nuclear power stations in the government-controlled part of Ukraine are up and running again and connected to the main electricity grid, the country’s energy provider, Ukrenergo, has said. Its chief executive, Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, encouraged Ukrainians to save energy where possible.

• Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has met with a handpicked cadre of mothers of soldiers fighting in Ukraine for a carefully staged meeting meant to calm public anger over mobilisation. While dozens of ordinary mothers have gone public saying they were snubbed by the Kremlin, Putin sat down with a former government official, the mother of a senior military and police official from Chechnya, and other women active in pro-war NGOs financed by the state.

• The Russian war effort in Ukraine is characterised by confusion among reservists over eligibility for service and inadequate training and equipment, according to the UK’s Ministry of Defence. In its daily update, the MoD said some reservists were having to serve with “serious chronic health conditions” since they were called up during Vladimir Putin’s announcement of a “partial mobilisation”.

• Armenia has asked the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to chair peace talks with Azerbaijan in a fresh challenge to Vladimir Putin’s increasingly loose grip on Russia’s regional allies in the wake of the war in Ukraine. The snub from a traditional ally to Putin comes immediately on the back of his disastrous summit with six former Soviet states.

• Germany’s Bundestag is planning to pass a resolution declaring the starvation of millions of Ukrainians under Joseph Stalin a genocide. The resolution, which will be jointly brought to the vote next week by the three governing parties and conservative opposition leaders, aims to serve as a “warning” to Moscow as Ukraine faces a potential hunger crisis this winter.

• Britain’s foreign secretary, James Cleverly, travelled to Kyiv on Thursday to meet the Ukrainian leadership and promise the UK’s support for as long as it takes. In his first visit to Ukraine since his appointment as foreign secretary, Cleverly presented a package of support including money for the reconstruction of schools, ambulances, the victims of sexual violence, and grain sales to the world’s poorest markets, such as Sudan and Yemen.

Good afternoon from London, it’s Léonie Chao-Fong still with you on the Russia-Ukraine war blog. Feel free to get in touch on Twitter or via email.

Britain’s defence secretary, Ben Wallace, has said Russian attacks on critical Ukrainian infrastructure are a sign of President Vladimir Putin’s “desperation”.

Putin is targeting Ukraine’s power grid and other civilian infrastructure to “mask” his military failures, Wallace told reporters during a visit to a shipyard in Glasgow.

He urged Ukrainians to “press the momentum to keep pushing Russia back”, adding:

On the civil front, they’ve got to protect that national infrastructure that Putin is deliberately targeting in the hope that he wrecks their economy and it means they struggle very greatly during the winter.

Targeting civilian infrastructure is illegal under international law, he said, adding that the UK is “not going to let that type of bullying and brutality be successful”.

Despite recent signs of Moscow’s failures, such as the withdrawal from Kherson and the firing of a slew of Russian commanders, Wallace warned against underestimating the Russian leader.

He said:

Russia is a country that at the moment does not care about its own people and which young men it sends to their deaths, and it will just keep on pushing those people in.

Mediazone, an independent Russian website founded by two of the people who started the protest group Pussy Riot, has published an account written by a soldier in the 155th Guards Naval Infantry Brigade in the Russian army.

They claim that the brigade has had 900 casualties in fighting near Pavlivka, south-west of Donetsk. An open letter from the brigade has previously accused military leaders of the loss of 300 men.

Now the new testimony, which the Guardian has not been able to verify, includes claims by an anonymous member of the brigade that 450-500 men were killed in three months of fighting.

“Everyone is demoralised. Nobody is celebrating, because so many of our guys are dead. Personally, I lost four friends in just two days,” it says.

The soldier says that despite the losses, generals won’t change tactics and have given medals out in an attempt to appease members of the brigade.

The soldier adds:

People are thinking of deserting, and I understand it, I am now contemplating the same idea. I have always served the motherland faithfully and used to condemn this kind of thinking, but now it is probably the only way we can stay alive.

The US has donated 22,500 blankets for warming centres run by Ukraine’s railway company, Ukrzaliznytsia, as temperatures plummet and millions are still without reliable access to power, the US ambassador to Kyiv, Bridget Brink, said.

The thermal blankets will be used at heating points at almost 100 railway stations across Ukraine, as part of a project implemented by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).