Ukraine has accused Russia of looting empty homes in the southern city of Kherson and occupying them with troops in civilian clothes to prepare for street fighting in what both sides predict will be one of the war’s most important battles. In recent days, Russia has ordered civilians out of Kherson in anticipation of a Ukrainian assault to recapture the city, the only regional capital Moscow has seized since its invasion in February.
Ukraine’s Russian-occupied city of Kherson was cut off from water and electricity supplies on Sunday after an airstrike and damage to the Kakhovka dam, local officials said. “In Kherson and a number of other areas in the region, there is temporarily no electricity or water supply,” the city’s Moscow-installed administration said on Telegram. Russia accused Ukraine of an act of “sabotage”.
Ukraine’s military said Russia was urging residents of Kherson to evacuate as soon as possible, sending them warning messages on their phones on Sunday. Russia was “occupying and evacuating” Kherson simultaneously, trying to convince Ukrainians its force are leaving when in fact they are digging in, Nataliya Humenyuk, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s southern forces, told state television. The Kremlin-installed administration in Kherson already has expelled tens of thousands of civilians from the city.
Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vučić has said he expects the battle of Kherson to be the defining battle of the war. Russian state-owned news agency Tass quoted him saying: “We have a difficult time ahead of us, next winter will be even more difficult than this one, because we are facing the Battle of Stalingrad, the decisive battle in the war in Ukraine, the battle for Kherson, in which both sides use thousands of tanks, aircraft, artillery. The west thinks that in this way it will be able to destroy Russia, Russia believes that in this way it will be able to protect what it took at the beginning of the war and bring the war to an end. This will create additional problems everywhere.”
Russia’s defence ministry took the unusual step of denying reports by Russian military bloggers that a naval infantry unit had lost hundreds of men in a fruitless offensive in eastern Ukraine, the state-owned RIA news agency said. It said the ministry had rejected the bloggers’ assertions that the 155th marine brigade of the Pacific Fleet had suffered “high, pointless losses in people and equipment”.
Ukraine continues to brace for fresh Russian attacks on its energy infrastructure. Russia “is concentrating forces and means for a possible repetition of massive attacks on our infrastructure, primarily energy”, said Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the Ukrainian president. Ukraine faced a 32% deficit in projected power supply on Monday, said Sergei Kovalenko, CEO of Yasno, a major supplier of energy to the capital. “This is a lot, and it’s force majeure,” he said. About 500 power generators were being sent to Ukraine by 17 EU countries as 4.5m Ukrainians were left without power.
Planned blackouts are scheduled to hit seven regions of Ukraine throughout Monday, according to Ukraine’s state-run energy company. The regions include the city of Kyiv, and the regions of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Cherkasy, Zhytomyr, Sumy, Kharkiv and Poltava.
Kyiv’s mayor urged residents to prepare for a worst-case scenario by making emergency plans to leave the city and stay with friends or family. Vitali Klitschko urged residents to “consider everything” including loss of power and water. “If you have extended family or friends outside Kyiv, where there is autonomous water supply, an oven, heating, please keep in mind the possibility of staying there for a certain amount of time.”
Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK, Vadym Prystaiko, echoed Klitschko’s words about evacuating Kyiv’s residents, saying “I hope it won’t come to this, and we’re still trying to renew all electric facilities, generating stations, the transformations, all of it. If it comes to it, we’ll have to move them back to west west of Ukraine, Lviv and all the places closer to the European Union. That’s a huge number of people to be located but Ukrainian winters can become quite harsh. We have to think how we do it.”
Maksym Kozytskyi, governor of Lviv, one of Ukraine’s westernmost regions, has announced preparation measures for receiving more refugees and internally displaced people into his region, and appealed for help with the provision of diesel generators and financial aid for medical supplies.
Ukraine has received its first delivery of Nasams and Apside air defence systems, the country’s defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, announced Monday. “We will continue to shoot down the enemy targets attacking us. Thank you to our partners: Norway, Spain and the US,” Reznikov wrote on Twitter.
Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti reported Monday that President Vladimir Putin will make a decision on whether to attend the next G20 summit in person by the end of the week. Zelenskiy has said he will not attend if Putin does. The summit in Bali is due to begin Tuesday 15 November.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told the media on his daily call on Monday that while Russia remains “open” to talks, it is unable to negotiate with Kyiv due to its refusal to hold talks with Russia.
The head of Ukraine’s Byzantine-rite Catholic Church, Sviatoslav Shevchuk, met Pope Francis at the Vatican on Monday and said there can be no dialogue with Russia as long as Moscow considered the neighbour it invaded a colony to be subjugated. The Orthodox church of Ukraine has said worshippers can celebrate Christmas on 25 December, a move away from the traditional date of 7 January directed against pro-Putin head of Russian Orthodox church.
The Kyiv Independent is reporting that “farmers’ warehouses, a cultural site, and private houses” were damaged in Zaporizhzhia region by Russian strikes, and according to local governor Pavlo Kyrylenko Russian forces have killed one civilian in Bakhmut and wounded five civilians elsewhere in the Donetsk region.
An internal rift over the supply of deadly drones to Russia for use in Ukraine has opened up in Iran, with a prominent conservative cleric and newspaper editor saying Russia is the clear aggressor in the war and the supply should stop. A former Iranian ambassador to Moscow has also hinted the foreign ministry may have been kept in the dark both by the Kremlin and the Iranian military.
Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK has told Sky News in London that the new British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, will visit the country soon. Sunak had promised that Ukraine would be his first overseas port of call if he became PM, but in a high-profile U-turn has headed to Egypt and Cop 27 instead. Prystaiko said:“We’re not going to discuss the dates, because of the security of your prime minister. But he’s coming to Ukraine quite soon.”
Russian forces are stepping up their strikes in a fiercely contested region of eastern Ukraine, worsening the already tough conditions for residents and the Ukrainian army, Ukrainian authorities said. “Very fierce Russian attacks on Donetsk region are continuing. The enemy is suffering serious losses there,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address.
US officials have reportedly warned the Ukrainian government in private that it needs to signal an openness to negotiating with Russia. Officials in Washington warned that “Ukraine fatigue” among allies could worsen if Kyiv continued to be closed to negotiations, the Washington Post reported. US officials told the paper that Ukraine’s position on negotiations with Russia was wearing thin among allies worried about the economic effects of a protracted war.
External power was restored to Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant two days after it was disconnected from the power grid when Russian shelling damaged high voltage lines, the UN nuclear watchdog said. Europe’s largest nuclear plant needs electricity to maintain vital cooling systems, but it had been running on emergency diesel generators since Russian shelling severed its outside connections.
The US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, held secretive talks with top Russian officials in hopes of reducing the risk of nuclear conflict, the Wall Street Journal has reported. It cited US and allied officials as saying that Sullivan held previously undisclosed conversations in recent months with the Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov and the Russian security council secretary Nikolai Patrushev, Sullivan’s counterpart. The White House declined to comment on the report. “We have nothing to say about this publication,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday.
