Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy discussed “efforts to maintain European unity” in a call with outgoing Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, after far right politician Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV) got the most votes in the Dutch election.
Kajsa Ollongren, the Dutch defence minister, said she hoped military support to Kyiv would continue but also that she was worried due to the PVV’s stance on Ukraine.
Robert Fico, Slovakia’s populist prime minister, has said he considers the war between Ukraine and Russia a ‘frozen conflict’.
The British Ministry of Defence said Russian forces in Ukraine continued to suffer mass casualties from Ukrainian long-range precision strikes well behind the frontline.
Ukraine’s truckers union said hopes of a rapid end to Polish trucker protests at the border were fading.
Finland temporarily closed all but one of its eight passenger crossings to Russia.
The Finnish prime minister, Petteri Orpo, said the high flow of migrants via Russia must stop.
The Ukrainian deputy prime minister, Olha Stefanishyna, said a veto of the country’s European aspirations at an EU summit next month “would be the irresponsibility of the others”.
Plans to expand the Grain from Ukraine programme further across Africa one year after its launch will be announced on Saturday by Zelenskiy, backed by the appointment of a new series of goodwill ambassadors including Charlotte Leslie, a former Conservative MP with deep contacts in the Middle East.
A Russian attack using cluster munitions killed three people in a suburb of Ukraine’s southern city of Kherson, a Ukrainian official said, bringing to six the number of civilians to die in a single day. Russian shelling also killed two people in the Donetsk region, Ukraine’s presidential office said.
On Thanksgiving, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, thanked the US for its support, saying that with “American support and global leadership, millions of Ukrainian lives have been saved”.
Ukraine has not reached a stalemate in its war with Russia because the west can help by “dropping five more queens on the board”, according to Timothy Snyder, a Yale professor and influential historian of eastern Europe.
A leading Russian politician and supporter of Vladimir Putin has denied a report that he adopted an infant who had been forcibly taken from an orphanage in Ukraine.
Russia has claimed it is succeeding in selling almost all of its oil above a western-imposed price cap of $60 a barrel. The EU, G7 countries and Australia introduced the price cap on Russian oil in December 2022.
The bulk of Ukrainian crops have entered the winter season in predominantly good condition, analysts APK-Inform quoted the state weather forecaster as saying. Ukraine is a grower of winter wheat, winter barley and winter rapeseed. Ukraine’s grain exports so far in the 2023-24 season that started in July are running 28% below the year-earlier volume, according to agriculture ministry data.
Russia has sentenced a Ukrainian man to 18 years in prison for trying to blow up buildings in the Moscow-controlled Ukrainian city of Melitopol. According to Russia’s Kommersant newspaper, Dmitri Golubev said: “I am Ukrainian, I was defending Ukraine.”
Ukraine’s national seed bank, one of the world’s largest, has been successfully moved from the frontline eastern city of Kharkiv to a safer location, said Crop Trust, a non-profit organisation.
Armenia did not take part in a summit held by a Russia-dominated security grouping, because the country has been irked by what it sees as a lack of Russian support over the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Ukraine has said it cannot produce enough electricity to meet growing demand for heating and is turning to neighbouring EU countries for help, amid fears of Russian strikes on energy facilities.
Russia is throwing “waves” of soldiers towards the embattled Ukrainian city of Avdiivka, suffering massive losses in their attempt to capture strategically important territory on the eastern frontlines, Ukrainian soldiers say.
The UK’s Ministry of Defence reports that a group of former Wagner mercenary soldiers have been recognised officially as Russian military veterans, after speculation over how they would be treated following their mutiny against Russia and death of their leader.
Ukraine said that it wants its export routes via Poland unblocked before it holds talks with Warsaw and the European Commission aimed at ending protests by Polish truckers that are reducing Ukrainian exports.
Finland said it would close all but one crossing point on its border with Russia in an effort to halt a flow of asylum seekers, as Estonia accused Moscow of mounting “a hybrid attack operation” on Europe’s eastern border.
