Russia-Ukraine war live: UK confirms supply of missiles to Kyiv as Russian forces might be preparing to leave Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant – as it happened

That’s it from the UK blog team for today. Thank you for following our coverage.

Here is a roundup of what we know on day 277 of the invasion.

And a young couple’s account of helping citizens and Kyiv’s army during the Russian onslaught in Kherson.

27 Nov 202212.01 EST

Lorenzo Tondo

Hundreds of Ukrainians streamed out of Kherson city on Sunday to flee Russian shelling, two weeks after its recapture from Russian occupying forces prompted jubilant celebrations.

The liberation of Kherson marked a major battlefield gain for Kyiv – reconquered after the Russians retreated to the east bank of the Dnipro River. However, since then inhabitants have struggled with no water, heating and electricity, because Moscow’s troops destroyed thermal and power plants before they left.

Evacuations began last week amid fears that damage to infrastructure caused by the war was too severe for people to endure over Ukraine’s harsh winter. The exodus has been exacerbated by Russian shelling, which has killed 32 civilians since Russian forces left the city on 9 November.

“It is sad that we are leaving our home,” Yevhen Yankov told the Associated Press as a van he was in inched forward. “Now we are free, but we have to leave, because there is shelling, and there are dead among the population.”

Ukraine only has enough power to cover 80% of its electricity needs, according to the country’s state grid operator Ukrenergo.

It comes after Russia’s seventh attack on Ukrainian energy infrastructure as part of a new strategy.

Here’s a quick look at the latest news at it approaches 6pm in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.

• The head of Ukraine’s state-run nuclear energy firm said on Sunday there were signs that Russian forces might be preparing to leave the vast Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant which they seized in March soon after their invasion. “One gets the impression they’re packing their bags and stealing everything they can,” Petro Kotin, head of Energoatom, said on national television.

• The UK Ministry of Defence has confirmed that as part of its aid package, the UK has provided Brimstone 2 missiles, a precision-guided missile, to the Ukrainian armed forces. “This aid has played a crucial role in stalling Russian advancements,” it said.

• The Belgian prime minister, Alexander De Croo, was on the second day of an unannounced visit to Ukraine on Sunday. Accompanied by the Belgian foreign minister, Hadja Lahbib, De Croo used the visit to announce additional Belgian support of around €37.4m.

• Russian forces have suffered heavy casualties during fighting in Ukraine’s south-central Donetsk province and are unlikely to achieve a breakthrough there, the UK Ministry of Defence says.

• Ukrainian authorities are gradually restoring power, aided by the reconnection of the country’s four nuclear plants, but millions of people are still without heat or electricity after the most devastating Russian airstrikes of the war.

• Russia kept up its onslaught on Ukrainian cities on Saturday with an attack on Dnipro which injured six people and destroyed seven houses, said the regional governor, Valentyn Reznichenko.

• Thirty-two civilians have been killed in Kherson since 9 November, when Russian forces withdrew from the southern city they had occupied for eight months, the Kyiv Independent quoted Ukraine’s national police chief, Ihor Klymenko, as saying. Since then, Russian troops have shelled Kherson frequently.

• Ukraine accused the Kremlin of reviving the “genocidal” tactics of Joseph Stalin as Kyiv commemorated a Soviet-era famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the winter of 1932-33.

• Volodymyr Zelenskiy hosted a summit in Kyiv with allied nations on Saturday to launch a “grain from Ukraine” initiative to export $150m worth of grain to countries most vulnerable to famine and drought. Up to 60 Ukrainian grain ships could be sent by the middle of next year to some of the world’s poorest countries in Africa, the Ukrainian president has said in a statement released to the Guardian.

• Belarus’s long-time foreign minister, Vladimir Makei, has “passed away suddenly”, the Belarusian state-run news agency Belta reported, without giving further detail. Belarus has been an ally of Russia and a base over the border for the invasion of Ukraine. The Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova posted on her Telegram channel that “we are shocked by the reports of the death”. Makei had been due to meet Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in Minsk on Monday.

• The prime ministers of Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine – Ingrida Šimonytė, Mateusz Morawiecki and Denys Shmyhal, respectively – met in Kyiv on Saturday for talks to discuss and reiterate their commitment to work together “in countering Russia’s armed aggression”.

• Russia is firing ageing cruise missiles stripped of their nuclear warheads at Ukrainian targets because Vladimir Putin’s stocks are so depleted, the UK Ministry of Defence has suggested. An intelligence update from the ministry on Saturday said the desperate improvisation by the Russian president’s struggling forces were “unlikely to achieve reliable effects”.

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The head of Ukraine’s state-run nuclear energy firm said on Sunday there were signs that Russian forces might be preparing to leave the vast Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant which they seized in March soon after their invasion, Reuters reports.

Such a move would be a major battlefield change in the partially-occupied south-eastern Zaporizhzhia region where the frontline has hardly shifted for months. Repeated shelling around the plant has spurred fears of a nuclear catastrophe.

“In recent weeks we are effectively receiving information that signs have appeared that they are possibly preparing to leave the [plant],” Petro Kotin, head of Energoatom, said on national television.

“Firstly, there are a very large number of reports in Russian media that it would be worth vacating the [plant] and maybe worth handing control [of it)] to the [International Atomic Energy Agency],” he said, referring to the United Nations nuclear watchdog. “One gets the impression they’re packing their bags and stealing everything they can.”

Russia and Ukraine, which was the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident in Chornobyl in 1986, have for months repeatedly accused each other of shelling the Zaporizhzhia reactor complex, which is no longer generating energy.

Asked if it was too early to talk about Russian troops leaving the plant, Kotin said on television: “It’s too early. We don’t see this now, but they are preparing [to leave].”

“All of the [Ukrainian] personnel are forbidden to pass checkpoints and travel to Ukrainian[-controlled] territory.”

The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has likened Russia’s tactics in Ukraine to the Holodomor, a man-made famine engineered by Joseph Stalin that led to the deaths of millions of Ukrainians.

Saturday was Holodomor Remembrance Day.

The UK Ministry of Defence has confirmed that as part of its aid package, the UK has provided Brimstone 2 missiles, a precision-guided missile, to the Ukrainian armed forces.

”This aid has played a crucial role in stalling Russian advancements,” it said.

My colleague Dalya Alberge has a story of a film studio that had to help the artists working out of its Kyiv branch flee the country when Russia invaded.

The Kremlin has sought to play down reports that a Russian-led security alliance of former Soviet countries is weakening in the wake of the war in Ukraine.

The Armenian prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, called into question the effectiveness of the six-nation Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) at a summit this week.

During a “family” photograph of leaders of countries in the CSTO in Yerevan on Wednesday, Pashinyan stepped away from Putin, who had been standing to his left.

Pashinyan then refused to sign a summit declaration, as he railed against the recent failures of the CSTO, which ties Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan into a mutual defence agreement.

Armenia’s criticism follows comments from Kazakhstan’s president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, at the UN general assembly in September during which he implicitly criticised Russia’s war in Ukraine.

On Sunday, Reuters reported that Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov had said attempts to break up CSTO had always existed and would continue to do so, but insisted that the alliance remained in high demand despite criticism this week from Armenia.

“There have always been attempts to [bring about] the CSTO’s disintegration,” news agencies quoted Peskov as saying in an interview broadcast on state television.

“But at least now we see that, despite all the difficulties, despite the possible contradictions even between member countries, this structure remains in high demand,” he said. “And it fully demonstrated its relevance and effectiveness, meaning the resolution of the situation in Kazakhstan.”

Russia, the dominant player in the CSTO, risks losing influence in parts of the former Soviet Union that it has long seen as its sphere of influence, as the conflict in Ukraine drags into its 10th month.

The retired Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly, who embarked on the longest single space flight by an American, has visited Ukraine.

Kelly, 58, a veteran of four space flights, visited the Okhmatdyt specialised children’s hospital.

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Some shocking images of the destroyed Antonivsky Bridge in Kherson have been published by AP photographer Bernat Armangué.

The bridge, the main crossing point over the Dnipro River in Kherson, was destroyed by Russian troops earlier in November, after Kremlin forces withdrew from the southern city.

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, accused the Russian army of deliberately destroying critical infrastructure during their withdrawal from the city, including electricity and water supplies.

Ukrainian troops entered Kherson on 11 November after the Russian army had withdrawn from the city, which they captured in the early stage of the conflict, shortly after Russian troops had entered Ukraine in February 2022.

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The Associated Press news agency has filed this update on the ongoing shelling by Russian forces in eastern and southern Ukraine overnight.

With persistent snowfall blanketing the capital, Kyiv on Sunday, analysts predicted that wintry weather — bringing with it frozen terrain and gruelling fighting conditions — could have an increasing impact on the direction of the conflict that has raged since Russian forces invaded Ukraine more than nine months ago.

But for the moment, both sides were bogged down by heavy rain and muddy battlefield conditions in some areas, experts said.

After a blistering barrage of Russian artillery strikes on at least two occasions over the past two weeks, infrastructure teams in Ukraine were fanning out in around-the-clock deployments to restore key basic services as many Ukrainians dealt with only a few hours of electricity per day — if any.

Ukrenergo, the state power grid operator, said on Sunday that electricity producers are now supplying about 80% of demand. That’s an improvement from Saturday’s 75%, the company says.

In the eastern Donetsk region, five people were killed in shelling over the past day, according to governor Pavlo Kyrylenko. Overnight shelling was reported by regional leaders in the Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk areas to the west.

Kharkiv governor Oleh Syniehubov said one person was killed and three wounded in the northeastern region.