Closing summary
It is coming up to 9pm in Kyiv. That’s it from me, Joe Middleton, and the Russia-Ukraine war blog for today.
Here is a round-up of everything you might have missed:
The EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell warned Moscow that its forces would be “annihilated” by the west’s military response if president Vladimir Putin used nuclear weapons against Ukraine, AFP reports. At the opening of the Diplomacy Academy in Brussels, Borrell said: “Any nuclear attack against Ukraine will create an answer, not a nuclear answer but such a powerful answer from the military side that the Russian army will be annihilated.” The Nato chief, Jens Stoltenberg, also said Russia faced “severe consequences” if it launched a nuclear assault on Ukraine.
After retreating about 20km in the north of the Kherson sector in early October, Russian forces are likely to be attempting to consolidate a new frontline west from the village of Mylove, according to British intelligence. Heavy fighting continues along this line, especially at the western end, where Ukrainian advances mean Russia’s flank is no longer protected by the Inhulets River, the latest UK Ministry of Defence report reads.
The Moscow-installed head of Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, Volodymyr Saldo, has urged residents to leave the area and asked Russia to help evacuate people.
Just hours later Russia confirmed it would evacuate residents from Kherson. The Russian deputy prime minister Marat Khusnullin said on state television: “The government took the decision to organise assistance for the departure of residents of the [Kherson] region to other regions of the country. We will provide everyone with free accommodation and everything necessary.”
Ukraine’s state emergency service said a 12-year-old boy had been rescued after hours under rubble, after rockets hit a five-story residential building in Mykolaiv.
Ukraine’s power grid has been “stabilised” after Russian strikes on the country that in particular targeted energy infrastructure, causing power and hot water cuts, the national energy operator Ukrenergo said Thursday.
A residential building in the southern Russian city of Belgorod near the Ukraine border was hit Thursday in shelling by Kyiv’s forces, the city governor said today. Mykhaylo Podolyak, a senior Ukrainian presidential adviser, denied Kyiv’s military was responsible and said Russia had tried to shell Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv on the border “but something went wrong”.
Russia said it had summoned diplomats from Germany, Denmark and Sweden to complain that representatives from Moscow and Gazprom had not been invited to join an investigation into ruptures of the Nord Stream gas pipelines. “Russia will obviously not recognise the pseudo-results of such an investigation unless Russian experts are involved,” the foreign ministry said.
Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, did not discuss ways to resolve the conflict in Ukraine at their bilateral meeting on Thursday, the state-run RIA news agency reported, citing the Kremlin.
The UN general assembly on Wednesday overwhelmingly voted to condemn Russia’s annexation of parts of Ukraine as 35 nations abstained including China, India, South Africa and Pakistan. The resolution “condemns the organisation by the Russian Federation of so-called referendums within the internationally recognised borders of Ukraine“ and “the attempted illegal annexation” announced last month of four regions by Russia president Vladimir Putin.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, told Russian television Thursday that the vote was anti-Russian and that the west had used methods of diplomatic terrorism against developing countries in order to force them to vote. He dismissed US claims that Washington did not persuade anyone to vote.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said Ukraine currently had only 10% of what it needed in terms of air defences.
The UK defence secretary, Ben Wallace, said that Russia would run out of supplies and armaments before the west did. He said procurement processes were in place among allies in the west that would ensure that the international community could continue arming Ukraine for years ahead.
The admission of Ukraine to Nato could result in a third world war, the deputy secretary of the Russian security council, Alexander Venediktov, told Russian state Tass news agency in an interview on Thursday.
Updated
Daniel Boffey reports for us from Kyiv:
Moscow has announced it will evacuate Kherson after an appeal from the Russian-installed head of the region, raising fears the occupied city at the heart of the south Ukrainian oblast will become a new frontline.
Marat Khusnullin, a Russian deputy prime minister, told state television on Thursday that residents would be helped to move away from the region in south Ukraine, which remains only partly occupied by invading troops due to a successful Ukrainian counterattack in recent months.
“The government took the decision to organise assistance for the departure of residents of the [Kherson] region to other regions of the country,” Khusnullin said.
The development followed a public request on the social media platform Telegram by Volodymyr Saldo, a former mayor of the port city, who was installed in April by the Russian forces as head of the wider Kherson region.
Read more: Russia announces Kherson evacuation, raising fears city will become frontline
Updated
