President Vladimir Putin has said Russia will “defend ourselves with all the means at our disposal” and warned that the threat of nuclear war is “on the rise”. In an address to his human rights council, Russia’s leader said his army’s “special military operation” in Ukraine could be a “long process”, but he saw no need to mobilise additional soldiers at this point.
Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has said Russia is attempting to “freeze” the fighting in Ukraine over the winter to prepare its forces for a renewed assault early next year. Stoltenberg urged Nato allies to continue sending weapons to Kyiv over the winter, adding that the conditions for a peaceful settlement to the war are “not there now”.
Oleksandr Starukh, the Zaporizhzhia regional governor, said on Telegram that Russia launched drone and missile strikes on two villages overnight, injuring a 15-year-old girl and two other people. The Guardian has not been able to verify the reports independently.
A road accident in the temporarily occupied eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk has left 16 people dead and several injured, according to a Russian-backed official and state media. The accident involved a minibus and a truck, whose passengers included soldiers, and took place between Torez and Shakhtarsk, emergency services told the Russian state-owned news agency Tass.
Shelling by Ukrainian forces killed at least six civilians in the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk on Tuesday, according to the Russian-installed head of the separatist-controlled eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, Alexey Kulemzin. The head of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), Denis Pushilin, said Ukrainian shelling killed a deputy in the self-proclaimed republic’s People’s Council, Maria Pirogova.
Dmytro Zhyvytsky, the governor of Sumy region on the Russian border, said several people were wounded when Russian forces fired 226 shells on seven communities during the day.
A drone attack set an oil storage tank on fire at an airfield in Kursk, the Russian region’s governor, Roman Starovoyt, has said. Video footage posted on social media showed a large explosion lighting up the night sky followed by a substantial fire at the airfield 175 miles (280km) from the Ukrainian border.
The drone attack came a day after Ukraine appeared to launch attacks on two military airfields deep inside Russian territory. For Kyiv the strike represented an unprecedented operation to disrupt the Kremlin strategy of trying to cripple the Ukrainian electrical grid to provoke a humanitarian catastrophe in a country on the verge of winter.
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said 31 “suspicious packages” had been sent to Ukrainian missions in 15 countries. In the past week, Ukraine says its embassies and consultants across Europe have received “bloody” packages, some containing animal eyes, in what Kyiv has described as a “campaign of terror and intimidation”.
Ukraine’s culture minister, Oleksandr Tkachenko, has called on the country’s western allies to boycott Russian culture. Writing in the Guardian, Tkachenko argues that a halt to performances of the music of Tchaikovsky and other Russian composers until the end of the war would be “pausing the performance of his works until Russia ceases its bloody invasion”.
The Kremlin said Vladimir Putin met senior officials on Tuesday to discuss “domestic security”, and Russia was taking “necessary” measures to fend off more Ukrainian attacks. One of the attacks struck the key Engels airfield in the Saratov region, where Russia keeps some of its strategic nuclear bombers.
The Kremlin has said a US military aid spending bill providing $800m to Ukraine approved by lawmakers on Tuesday was “provocation towards our country”. The Fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, authorises the additional spending for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, an increase of $500m over President Joe Biden’s request earlier this year.
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said it had not “enabled” Ukraine to carry out strikes inside Russia, after a spate of drone attacks on military-linked facilities deep within Russian territory. Kyiv did not directly claim responsibility but neither did it criticise the action, which killed three people and damaged long-range bombers and a fuel depot, according to reports from Russia.
The Kremlin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said he agreed with comments by Blinken about the need for lasting peace in Ukraine, but that Moscow does not see the prospect of talks “at the moment”. He added that in order for talks to happen with potential partners, Russia would need to fulfil the goals of its “special military operation”.
Britain has ordered “several thousand” NLAW anti-tank weapons to replace the 7,000 donated to Ukraine in the past year. Ben Wallace, the UK defence secretary, said the NLAWs played “a decisive role” in pushing back the Russian invasion, but Labour has complained that the deal took nearly 10 months to sign and the replacements will take three years to make.
Iran has so far not delivered ballistic missiles to Russia and may not do so, a senior Ukrainian presidential adviser has said. Mykhailo Podolyak also told the Guardian that Russian forces had run short of their first batch of Iranian drones – and only had enough of their own cruise missiles in their stockpile for “two or three” more mass strikes against Ukraine.
Belarus plans to move military equipment and security forces on Wednesday and Thursday in what it says are checks on its response to possible acts of terrorism, the state Belta news agency reported. “During this period, it is planned to move military equipment and personnel of the national security forces,” the news agency cited the country’s security council as saying.
Poland is preparing to deploy the German Patriot air defence system on its territory, after Berlin refused to place the system in Ukraine, Poland’s defence minister, Mariusz Blaszczak, said on Twitter. Germany last month offered Poland the Patriot system to help secure its airspace after a stray missile crashed and killed two people in Poland.
Europe is likely to scrape through this winter without cutting off gas customers despite reduced Russian supplies, but even adjusting to colder homes and paying more may not be enough in coming years, analysts have told AFP. Russia’s progressive reduction of gas supplies to Europe via pipeline triggered a bidding war for liquefied natural gas (LNG), sending prices sharply higher.
At least 441 civilians were killed by Russian forces during the first weeks of the war in Ukraine, according to a report by the UN’s human rights office. Many of the bodies documented in the report bore signs that the victims may have been intentionally killed, the report by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, visited troops close to frontlines in eastern Ukraine on Tuesday. Addressing service personnel later in the presidential palace in Kyiv, Zelenskiy said he had spent the day with troops in Donbas, theatre of the heaviest battles, and in Kharkiv region, where Ukrainians have retaken swaths of territory from Russian forces.
Russian and Ukrainian authorities confirmed the exchange of 120 people in a prisoner swap. According to the Russian defence ministry, 60 servicemen were returned from “Kyiv-controlled territory”. Ukraine received 60 prisoners in return, Andrii Yermak, Ukraine’s presidential chief of staff, said.
Ukraine’s health ministry has asked regional authorities to consider suspending non-essential surgeries and hospitalisations due to power blackouts. In a statement, the ministry said hospitals were continuing to provide emergency care but that planned surgeries should be temporarily suspended to ease the load on the medical system amid potential future blackouts.
Russian defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, said that Ukraine was shelling the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, deliberately creating the threat of a possible nuclear catastrophe. Shoigu said Russian forces were taking “all measures” to ensure the safety of the power plant, Europe’s largest, in the face of what he called “nuclear terrorism” from Kyiv.
Russia’s defence ministry has said it has deployed mobile coastal defence missile systems on a northern Kuril island, part of a strategically located chain of islands that stretch between Japan and the Russian Kamchatka peninsula. Japan lays claim to the Russian-held southern Kuril islands, which Tokyo calls the Northern Territories, a territorial row that dates to the end of the second world war, when Soviet troops seized them from Japan.
A US national who was arrested by pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine in the summer has been released and is residing without documents in the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk. Suedi Murekezi, 35, told the Guardian he had been unable to leave Donetsk after spending more than four months in different prisons and basements in Russian-occupied Ukraine because he did not have any identity papers.
Senior EU officials have vowed to ensure Ukraine gets €18bn in financial aid, after Hungary vetoed the release of the funds. Earlier Viktor Orbán’s government was accused of “holding hostage” funds for Ukrainian hospitals and “cynical obstructionism” after Hungary confirmed on Tuesday that it would block €18bn of aid for Ukraine. The move by the Orbán government is widely seen as an attempt to gain leverage in separate disputes over Hungary’s access to €13bn EU funds.
