A summary of today's developments
Russian forces have “destroyed” the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, while Ukraine’s military reported missile, rocket and airstrikes in multiple parts of the country. The latest battles of Russia’s nine-and-a-half-month war in Ukraine have centred on four provinces that Russian president Vladimir Putin illegally claimed to have annexed in late September, the Associated Press reported.
The head of Nato has expressed worry that the fighting in Ukraine could spin out of control and become a war between Russia and Nato, according to an interview released on Friday. “If things go wrong, they can go horribly wrong,” Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said in remarks to Norwegian broadcaster NRK.
Iran’s backing for the Russian military is likely to grow in coming months and Moscow will probably offer Tehran an “unprecedented” level of military support in return, the UK Ministry of Defence has said. The ministry’s latest intelligence update said Iran had become one of Russia’s top military backers since Russia invaded Ukraine in February and that Moscow was now trying to obtain more weapons, including hundreds of ballistic missiles.
Heavy fighting has continued in eastern and southern Ukraine, mainly in regions that Russia illegally annexed in September. Associated Press reported Ukraine’s presidential office as saying on Friday that five civilians had been killed and another 13 wounded by Russian shelling in the past 24 hours.
Russia wants to turn Ukraine into a “dependent dictatorship” like Belarus, the wife of jailed Belarusian Nobel Peace prize laureate Ales Bialiatski said on Saturday upon receiving the prize on his behalf, speaking his words. Bialiatski, Russian rights group Memorial and Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties won the 2022 Nobel Peace prize in October, amid the war in Ukraine that followed Russia’s invasion of its neighbour.
Australia’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, said the government would place targeted sanctions on Russia and Iran in response to what it called “egregious” human rights violations.
Moscow has announced it is banning 200 Canadian officials from entering Russia in response to similar sanctions from Ottawa. The health minister, Jean-Yves Duclos, and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce head, Victor Dodig, were among those targeted, Agence France-Presse reported.
Boris Johnson has urged western countries to “look urgently” at what more they can do to support Ukraine in the hopes of ending the war against Russia as soon as next year. The former UK prime minister, who was hailed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy as a key ally in the country’s fight against Russia, used an article in the Wall Street Journal to argue that ending the war as soon as possible is “in everyone’s interest, including Russia”.
A trio representing the three nations at the centre of the war in Ukraine will receive the Nobel Peace Prize on Saturday, showing no sign of giving up the fight against Vladimir Putin and his Minsk ally. Jailed Belarusian human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski, Russian human rights organisation Memorial and Ukraine’s Centre for Civil Liberties (CCL) will be presented with their awards at a formal ceremony in Oslo, Agence France-Presse reports.
Explosions have been reported at Berdiansk airbase in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region. Three large explosions were heard, as well as smaller ones, near the Russian-occupied city on the coast of the Sea of Azov.
Ukraine says its southern regions are suffering the worst electricity outages days after the latest bout of Russian attacks on the country’s energy grid. The head of Ukraine’s grid operator Ukrenergo, Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, said workers were struggling most to restore power in the Black Sea regions of Odessa, which was badly hit on Monday, and around the recently recaptured city of Kherson.
All non-critical infrastructure in Ukraine’s southern port city of Odesa were without power after Russia used drones to hit energy facilities, local officials said, with much of the surrounding region also affected.
Vladimir Putin said Russia could amend its military doctrine by introducing the possibility of a pre-emptive strike to disarm an enemy, in an apparent reference to a nuclear attack. Speaking just days after warning that the risk of nuclear war was rising but Russia would not strike first, Putin said on Friday that Moscow was considering whether to adopt what he called Washington’s concept of a pre-emptive strike.
Ukraine’s foreign minister said his government was working with the UN’s nuclear watchdog to create a safety zone around the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Dmytro Kuleba said at a joint press conference in Kyiv with his Slovak counterpart, Rastislav Káčer, that Kyiv remained “in close contact” with Rafael Grossi, the International Atomic Energy Agency head.
Russia claimed its proposed safety zone around the Zaporizhzhia plant was to “stop Ukrainian shelling”. Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, also said the US’s withdrawal from a treaty banning intermediate-range nuclear missiles was a “destructive” act that created a vacuum and stoked additional security risks.
Updated
The Ministry of Defense of Ukraine has tweeted about an attack by Russian forces in Kherson.
Hospitals, children's centers - the favorite targets of russian terrorists. Today, they proved that they are even lower than terrorists when they hit a maternity ward of a hospital, this time in Kherson. Fortunately, there were no casualties.
— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) December 10, 2022
All non-critical infrastructure in Ukraine’s southern port city of Odesa was without power after Russia used drones to hit energy facilities, local officials said on Saturday, with much of the surrounding region also affected.
“Due to the scale of the damage all users in Odesa except critical infrastructure have been disconnected from electricity,” Odesa mayor, Gennadiy Trukhanov, wrote on Facebook.
Odesa, Ukraine’s largest port city, had a population of over 1 million before Russia’s 24 February invasion.
A statement posted by the city administration on the Telegram app said that Russian strikes hit key transmission lines and equipment in Odesa region in the early hours of Saturday.
Australia’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, said the government would place targeted sanctions on Russia and Iran in response to what it called “egregious” human rights violations.
The announcement comes after Australia’s centre-left Labour government in October imposed targeted financial sanctions and travel bans on 28 Russian-appointed separatists, ministers and senior officials after president Vladimir Putin proclaimed the annexation of four regions of Ukraine.
Since the start of the conflict, Australia has sanctioned hundreds of Russian individuals and entities, including most of Russia’s banking sector and all organisations responsible for the country’s sovereign debt.
It also has supplied defence equipment and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, while outlawing exports of alumina and aluminium ores, including bauxite, to Russia, Reuters reports.
In a smothering fog cloaking the woods of the Donbas, the sound of artillery takes on a spooky, disconnected quality.
Guns crack nearby, invisible among the skeletal branches. Shells whicker in the gloom towards the Russian lines around the key city of Bakhmut, distant thuds marking when they hit their targets. When the Russian guns fire back, it’s with a different sound, the crump of incoming fire.
Dug into a copse of thick scrub, a self-propelled howitzer of the 24th mechanised brigade waits for its orders as neighbouring guns fire, hidden too among the winter branches on a low ridge line.
The crew smoke, waiting for coordinates to fire to come over the walkie talkie. The fog means no drones are flying – but the relative paucity of incoming Russian shells makes the soldiers nervous.
Viktor Bout, the notorious arms dealer dubbed the “Merchant of Death”, has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and backed Moscow’s assault on Ukraine.
Speaking to the Kremlin-backed RT channel in an interview released on Saturday, Bout said he kept a portrait of Putin in his prison cell in the United States, AFP reports.
“I am proud that I am a Russian person, and our president is Putin,” the former Soviet air force pilot said.
“I know that we will win,” he added, saying he was enjoying snow and “the air of freedom” upon his return to Russia.
Bout, 55, said he “fully” supported Russia’s military offensive in Ukraine and would have volunteered to go to the front if he had the “opportunity and necessary skills”.
“Why did we not do it earlier?” he said, referring to Putin’s decision to launch an offensive against Ukraine in February.
Homes damaged by a Russian military strike in Bakhmut.
That’s it from me, Tom Ambrose, for today. My colleague Nadeem Badshah will be along shortly to continue bringing you all the latest news from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Updated
The victory lap in Moscow began even before the An-148 jet carrying the notorious arms dealer once dubbed the “merchant of death” touched down at Vnukovo airport.
Viktor Bout, arrested in 2008, had been returned to Russia more than 14 years after his arrest, much of that time spent incarcerated in the US. “The game is over,” he had said as US drug enforcement administration agents and Thai police burst into a hotel conference room where he thought he was meeting members of Farc, the Colombian rebel group – but they were actually undercover US agents.
Since that day, he has been something of an obsession among Russian officials, a person they claimed was wrongfully imprisoned and framed for trafficking arms around the world, but also seemed oddly important to the country’s security and pro-Kremlin establishment.
Both Russia and Bout had long denied suspicions that he was an asset for the Russian spy services, and in his first remarks after arriving, Bout seemed to nod and wink at the belief that he held some secret value for the Kremlin. “I don’t think I’m somehow important for Russian politics,” he said, before adding a line now common in Russian war films and military circles: “We don’t abandon our own, right?”
Now, using Brittney Griner, the US women’s basketball star convicted of carrying marijuana oil through Moscow in February, just before Russia launched its war in Ukraine, the Kremlin has found the recipe for a deal.
Updated
The winners of this year’s Nobel peace prize from Belarus, Russia and Ukraine shared their visions of a fairer world and denounced Russian president Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine during Saturday’s award ceremony.
Oleksandra Matviichuk of Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties dismissed calls for a political compromise that would allow Russia to retain some of the illegally annexed Ukrainian territories, saying that “fighting for peace does not mean yielding to pressure of the aggressor, it means protecting people from its cruelty.”
“Peace cannot be reached by a country under attack laying down its arms,” she said, her voice trembling with emotion. “This would not be peace, but occupation.”
Matviichuk repeated her earlier call for Putin – and Belarus’ authoritarian president Alexander Lukashenko, who provided his country’s territory for Russian troops to invade Ukraine – to face an international tribunal.
“We have to prove that the rule of law does work, and justice does exist, even if they are delayed,” she said.
Matviichuk was named a co-winner of the 2022 peace prize in October along with Russian human rights group Memorial and Ales Bialiatski, head of the Belarusian rights group Viasna, the Associated Press reported.
Updated
Summary
The time in Kyiv has just gone 4pm. Here is a roundup of the day’s stories so far:
Russian forces have “destroyed” the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, while Ukraine’s military reported missile, rocket and airstrikes in multiple parts of the country. The latest battles of Russia’s nine-and-a-half-month war in Ukraine have centred on four provinces that Russian president Vladimir Putin illegally claimed to have annexed in late September, the Associated Press reported.
The head of Nato has expressed worry that the fighting in Ukraine could spin out of control and become a war between Russia and Nato, according to an interview released on Friday. “If things go wrong, they can go horribly wrong,” Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said in remarks to Norwegian broadcaster NRK.
Iran’s backing for the Russian military is likely to grow in coming months and Moscow will probably offer Tehran an “unprecedented” level of military support in return, the UK Ministry of Defence has said. The ministry’s latest intelligence update said Iran had become one of Russia’s top military backers since Russia invaded Ukraine in February and that Moscow was now trying to obtain more weapons, including hundreds of ballistic missiles.
Heavy fighting has continued in eastern and southern Ukraine, mainly in regions that Russia illegally annexed in September. Associated Press reported Ukraine’s presidential office as saying on Friday that five civilians had been killed and another 13 wounded by Russian shelling in the past 24 hours.
Russia wants to turn Ukraine into a “dependent dictatorship” like Belarus, the wife of jailed Belarusian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Byalyatski said on Saturday upon receiving the prize on his behalf, speaking his words. Byalyatski, Russian rights group Memorial and Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties won the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize in October, amid the war in Ukraine that followed Russia’s invasion of its neighbour, Reuters reported.
Moscow has announced it is banning 200 Canadian officials from entering Russia in response to similar sanctions from Ottawa. The health minister, Jean-Yves Duclos, and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce chief, Victor Dodig, were among those targeted, Agence France-Presse reported.
Boris Johnson has urged western countries to “look urgently” at what more they can do to support Ukraine in the hopes of ending the war against Russia as soon as next year. The former UK prime minister, who was hailed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy as a key ally in the country’s fight against Russia, used an article in the Wall Street Journal to argue that ending the war as soon as possible is “in everyone’s interest, including Russia”.
A trio representing the three nations at the centre of the war in Ukraine will receive the Nobel Peace Prize on Saturday, showing no sign of giving up the fight against Vladimir Putin and his Minsk ally. Jailed Belarusian human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski, Russian human rights organisation Memorial and Ukraine’s Centre for Civil Liberties (CCL) will be presented with their awards at a formal ceremony in Oslo, Agence France-Presse reports.
Explosions have been reported at Berdiansk airbase in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region. Three large explosions were heard, as well as smaller ones, near the Russian-occupied city on the coast of the Sea of Azov.
Ukraine says its southern regions are suffering the worst electricity outages days after the latest bout of Russian attacks on the country’s energy grid. The head of Ukraine’s grid operator Ukrenergo, Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, said workers were struggling most to restore power in the Black Sea regions of Odessa, which was badly hit on Monday, and around the recently recaptured city of Kherson.
Vladimir Putin said Russia could amend its military doctrine by introducing the possibility of a pre-emptive strike to disarm an enemy, in an apparent reference to a nuclear attack. Speaking just days after warning that the risk of nuclear war was rising but Russia would not strike first, Putin said on Friday that Moscow was considering whether to adopt what he called Washington’s concept of a pre-emptive strike.
Ukraine’s foreign minister said his government was working with the UN’s nuclear watchdog to create a safety zone around the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Dmytro Kuleba said at a joint press conference in Kyiv with his Slovak counterpart, Rastislav Káčer, that Kyiv remained “in close contact” with Rafael Grossi, the International Atomic Energy Agency head.
Russia claimed its proposed safety zone around the Zaporizhzhia plant was to “stop Ukrainian shelling”. Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, also said the US’s withdrawal from a treaty banning intermediate-range nuclear missiles was a “destructive” act that created a vacuum and stoked additional security risks.
Updated
People gather near a building destroyed in recent shelling in Donetsk, Ukraine, earlier today.
Updated
Russia wants to turn Ukraine into a “dependent dictatorship” like Belarus, the wife of jailed Belarusian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Byalyatski said on Saturday upon receiving the prize on his behalf, speaking his words.
Byalyatski, Russian rights group Memorial and Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties won the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize in October, amid the war in Ukraine that followed Russia’s invasion of its neighbour, Reuters reported.
Receiving the award on behalf of her husband at Oslo City Hall, Natallia Pinchuk said Byalyatski dedicated the prize to “millions of Belarusian citizens who stood up and took action in the streets and online to defend their civil rights”.
“It highlights the dramatic situation and struggle for human rights in the country,” she said, adding she was speaking her husband’s words.
Pinchuk has met her husband once since he was named a Nobel peace prize laureate, in prison, behind a glass wall, she told a news conference on Friday.
Updated
City of Bakhmut now just 'burnt ruins', says Zelenskiy
Russian forces have “destroyed” the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, while Ukraine’s military reported missile, rocket and airstrikes in multiple parts of the country.
The latest battles of Russia’s nine-and-a-half-month war in Ukraine have centred on four provinces that Russian president Vladimir Putin illegally claimed to have annexed in late September, the Associated Press reported.
The fighting indicates Moscow’s struggle to establish control of the regions and Ukraine’s determination to reclaim them. Zelenskiy said the situation “remains very difficult” in several frontline cities in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk provinces.
Together, the provinces make up the Donbas, an expansive industrial region bordering Russia that Putin identified as a focus from the war’s outset, where Moscow-backed separatists have fought since 2014.
“Bakhmut, Soledar, Maryinka, Kreminna. For a long time, there is no living place left on the land of these areas that have not been damaged by shells and fire,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address.
“The occupiers actually destroyed Bakhmut, another Donbas city that the Russian army turned into burned ruins.”
He did not specify what he meant by “destroyed”, and some buildings remained standing and residents were seen in city streets.
Updated
Residents stand in the yard of their destroyed apartment building in Bakhmut, as Russia’s attack on Ukraine continues, in Donetsk region, Ukraine.
Boris Johnson has urged western countries to “look urgently” at what more they can do to support Ukraine in the hopes of ending the war against Russia as soon as next year.
The former UK prime minister, who was hailed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy as a key ally in the country’s fight against Russia, used an article in the Wall Street Journal to argue that ending the war as soon as possible is “in everyone’s interest, including Russia”.
He said that while the significant financial commitment to Ukraine is “painful” during a period of budgetary constraints, “time is money, and the longer this goes on the more we will all end up paying in military support”.
Johnson has remained a vocal supporter of Ukrainian efforts since leaving office in September, PA Media reports. His successor Rishi Sunak, who visited Kyiv last month, has pledged to continue UK backing for Ukraine.
The former prime minister wrote:
There is no land-for-peace deal to be done, even if Mr Putin were offering it and even if he were to be trusted, which he is not. Since the war can end only one way, the question is how fast we get to the inevitable conclusion.
It’s in everyone’s interest, including Russia’s, that the curtain comes down as soon as possible on Mr Putin’s misadventure. Not in 2025, not in 2024, but in 2023.
Johnson warns that next winter could prove even more difficult than this one, as gas supplies run low for countries once reliant on Russian fuel. He said:
The longer Mr Putin continues with his senseless attacks, the longer the global economic haemorrhage will continue as well. Are we really going to wait and let this thing drift until Mr Putin has regained some of his leverage?
It is time to look urgently at what more the west can do to help the Ukrainians achieve their military objectives, or at least to kick the Russians out of all the territories invaded this year.
That’s the only plausible basis on which a conversation about the future could begin.
Updated
Ukrainian army soldiers on the frontline in Donbas, Ukraine.
A trio representing the three nations at the centre of the war in Ukraine will receive the Nobel Peace Prize on Saturday, showing no sign of giving up the fight against Vladimir Putin and his Minsk ally.
Jailed Belarusian human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski, Russian human rights organisation Memorial and Ukraine’s Centre for Civil Liberties (CCL) will be presented with their awards at a formal ceremony in Oslo, Agence France-Presse reports.
At the Nobel Institute on Friday, CCL head Oleksandra Matviichuk urged western countries to continue to help Ukraine liberate its territories occupied by Russia, including Crimea.
She told reporters:
Authoritarian leaders ... see any attempt to dialogue as a sign of weakness.
The CCL has documented war crimes committed by Russian troops in Ukraine for the past eight years, crimes for which Matviichuk wants to see Putin and his ally, Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko, brought to justice.
Matviichuk said in English:
This war has a genocidal character. If Ukraine stops its resistance, there will be no more of us.
So I have no doubt that sooner or later Putin will appear before an international court.
Moscow has announced it is banning 200 Canadian officials from entering Russia in response to similar sanctions from Ottawa.
The health minister, Jean-Yves Duclos, and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce chief, Victor Dodig, were among those targeted, Agence France-Presse reported.
The Russian foreign ministry said the move came in response to “personal sanctions against Russian officials”.
It branded the politics of the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, as “Russophobic”.
The list also includes Conservative party spokesperson Sarah Fischer, Telesat CEO Daniel Goldberg, chief electoral officer Stephane Perrault and several prominent Canadians of Ukrainian origin.
Since Putin invaded Ukraine in February, Canada has sanctioned more than 1,400 individuals and entities in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
Russia has retaliated with similar sanctions.
Iran's support for Russia set to grow in return for 'unprecedented' military access, UK MoD says
Iran’s backing for the Russian military is likely to grow in coming months and Moscow will probably offer Tehran an “unprecedented” level of military support in return, the UK Ministry of Defence has said.
The ministry’s latest intelligence update said Iran had become one of Russia’s top military backers since Russia invaded Ukraine in February and that Moscow was now trying to obtain more weapons, including hundreds of ballistic missiles.
In return Russia is highly likely offering Iran an unprecedented level of military and technical support that is transforming their defence relationship.
The ministry said Russia had highly likely used a large proportion of its stock of its own SS-26 Iskander short-range ballistic missiles, which could carry a 500kg warhead up to 500km.
If Russia succeeds in bringing a large number of Iranian ballistic missiles into service, it will likely use them to continue and expand its campaign of strikes against Ukraine’s critical national infrastructure.
Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine - 10 December 2022
— Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ) December 10, 2022
Find out more about the UK government's response: https://t.co/32IwfHj0a1
🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/gT1KKRBrap
Updated
Heavy fighting has continued in eastern and southern Ukraine, mainly in regions that Russia illegally annexed in September.
Associated Press reported Ukraine’s presidential office as saying on Friday that five civilians had been killed and another 13 wounded by Russian shelling in the past 24 hours.
Donetsk’s regional governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said Russian forces were pressing an offensive on Bakhmut with daily attacks, despite taking heavy casualties.
He said in televised remarks:
You can best describe those attacks as cannon fodder. They are mostly relying on infantry and less on armor, and they can’t advance.
In neighbouring Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, the regional governor, Serhiy Haidai, said the Ukrainian military was pushing its counteroffensive toward Kreminna and Svatove.
In the south, Kherson’s regional governor, Yaroslav Yanyshevych, said eight civilians were wounded by Russian shelling in the past 24 hours. In Kherson city, which Ukraine recaptured last month, a children’s hospital and a morgue were damaged.
In the neighbouring Zaporizhzhia region, Russian forces shelled Nikopol and Chervonohryhorivka, which are across the Dnieper River from the Russia-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
Zaporizhzhia’s governor, Valentyn Reznichenko, said Russian shelling damaged residential buildings and power lines.
In the Kharkiv region, in the north-east, governor Oleh Syniehubov said three civilians were wounded by Russian shelling, with one later dying.
Nato chief warns against conflict spiralling into Russia-Nato war
The head of Nato has expressed worry that the fighting in Ukraine could spin out of control and become a war between Russia and Nato, according to an interview released Friday.
“If things go wrong, they can go horribly wrong,” Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said in remarks to Norwegian broadcaster NRK.
It is a terrible war in Ukraine. It is also a war that can become a full-fledged war that spreads into a major war between Nato and Russia. We are working on that every day to avoid that.
Associated Press also reported that the Stoltenberg said in the interview that “there is no doubt that a full-fledged war is a possibility”.
Stoltenberg, a former prime minister of Norway, added that it was important to avoid a conflict “that involves more countries in Europe and becomes a full-fledged war in Europe”.
Moscow has repeatedly accused Nato allies of effectively becoming a party to the conflict by providing Ukraine with weapons, training its troops and feeding military intelligence to attack Russian forces.
In comments that reflected soaring tensions between Russia and the west, President Vladimir Putin suggested Moscow might think about using what he described as the US concept of a preemptive strike.
Speaking about a disarming strike, maybe it’s worth thinking about adopting the ideas developed by our U.S. counterparts, their ideas of ensuring their security.
Updated
Summary
Hello and welcome back to the Guardian’s continuing live coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war.
Vladimir Putin has raised the possibility of a settlement to end the war in Ukraine, while maintaining that his military offensive is still going to plan.
The Russian president said:
The settlement process as a whole, yes, it will probably be difficult and will take some time – but one way or another, all participants in this process will have to agree with the realities that are taking shape on the ground.
Putin’s remarks on Friday – at a press conference in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan – came just days after he said the military operation could be a “long-term process”.
Here’s a brief rundown on the other latest developments in the war.
Explosions have been reported at Berdiansk airbase in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region. Three large explosions were heard, as well as smaller ones, near the Russian-occupied city on the coast of the Sea of Azov.
Ukraine says its southern regions are suffering the worst electricity outages days after the latest bout of Russian attacks on the country’s energy grid. The head of Ukraine’s grid operator Ukrenergo, Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, said workers were struggling most to restore power in the Black Sea regions of Odessa, which was badly hit on Monday, and around the recently recaptured city of Kherson.
Vladimir Putin said Russia could amend its military doctrine by introducing the possibility of a pre-emptive strike to disarm an enemy, in an apparent reference to a nuclear attack. Speaking just days after warning that the risk of nuclear war was rising but Russia would not strike first, Putin said on Friday that Moscow was considering whether to adopt what he called Washington’s concept of a pre-emptive strike.
Ukraine’s foreign minister said his government was working with the UN’s nuclear watchdog to create a safety zone around the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Dmytro Kuleba said at a joint press conference in Kyiv with his Slovak counterpart, Rastislav Káčer, that Kyiv remained “in close contact” with Rafael Grossi, the International Atomic Energy Agency head.
Russia claimed its proposed safety zone around the Zaporizhzhia plant was to “stop Ukrainian shelling”. Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, also said the US’s withdrawal from a treaty banning intermediate-range nuclear missiles was a “destructive” act that created a vacuum and stoked additional security risks.
President Joe Biden said he had spoken with US basketball star Brittney Griner and found her “in good spirits” after her release from custody. Russia freed Griner on Thursday in a high-level prisoner exchange for the notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout, who had been held in a US prison for 12 years.
The mother of Viktor Bout has thanked Vladimir Putin for her son’s release as part of the swap with the US. Bout, nicknamed the “Merchant of Death”, is a former Soviet lieutenant colonel whom the US justice department once described as one of the world’s most prolific arms dealers. Russian state media reported that he had arrived back in the country.
Belarus has told the United Nations it will accept, without preconditions, the transit of Ukrainian grains through its territory for export from Lithuanian ports, a UN spokesman said. UN secretary general António Guterres met the Belarus deputy foreign minister, Yury Ambrazevich, in New York on Friday. The spokesman said after the meeting that Ambrazevich also “reiterated the requests from his government to be able export its own fertiliser products, which are currently subject to sanctions”.
The US has expressed alarm over a “full-scale defence partnership” between Moscow and Tehran, describing it as “harmful” to Ukraine, Iran’s neighbours and the world. Western powers have accused Iran of supplying drones to Russia – which Moscow denies – as Russian forces batter Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. Washington has previously condemned Iran-Russia security cooperation but on Friday described an extensive relationship involving equipment such as helicopters and fighter jets as well as drones, with the latter items resulting in new US sanctions.
French oil giant TotalEnergies has bowed to international pressure and announced it intends to “gradually withdraw” from its Russian investments. The world’s fifth-largest oil company said on Friday that it would remove its two representatives from the board of Novatek, Russia’s dominant private gas exporter.
