Closing summary
It’s nearly 9pm in Kyiv. Here’s where we stand:
The head of Ukraine’s national power grid operator, Ukrenergo, has described the damage dealt to Ukrainian power-generating facilities by Russian missile attacks as “colossal”. Volodymyr Kudrytskyi also dismissed calls to evacuate civilians from some cities worst hit by energy shortages as “inappropriate”.
Ukrainians are likely to live with blackouts at least until the end of March, the head of a major energy provider said, as the government started free evacuations for people in Kherson to other regions. Half of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure had been damaged by Russian attacks, the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said, leaving millions of people without electricity and water as winter sets in and temperatures drop below freezing.
Russia’s Gazprom has threatened to cut its gas flows to Europe via Ukraine as early as next week. In a statement, the Russian state-owned energy giant said some gas flows being kept in Ukraine were actually meant for Moldova, and accused Kyiv of obstructing the delivery of 52.52m cubic metres from transiting to Moldova.
Ukraine’s SBU security service and police have raided a 1,000-year-old Orthodox Christian monastery in Kyiv as part of operations to counter suspected “subversive activities by Russian special services”.
Russian shelling hit a humanitarian aid distribution centre in the town of Orihiv in south-eastern Ukraine on Tuesday, killing a volunteer and wounding two women, the regional governor said. Oleksandr Starukh, governor of the Zaporizhzhia region, gave no further details of the attack on Orihiv, about 70 miles east of the site of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station which has been shelled in the past few days.
The EU will give a further €2.5bn (£2.2bn) to Ukraine for the reconstruction of the country, the head of the bloc’s executive, Ursula von der Leyen, has announced. Zelenskiy said he was “grateful” and that the aid would make “a strong contribution to the stability of Ukraine on the eve of a difficult winter”.
The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has warned his country must be prepared for the situation in Ukraine to escalate. This could include the destruction of infrastructure, he added while speaking at a conference in Berlin.
Russians have murdered, tortured and kidnapped Ukrainians in a systematic pattern that could implicate top officials in war crimes, the US state department’s ambassador for global criminal justice said Monday. There is mounting evidence that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “has been accompanied by systemic war crimes committed in every region where Russian forces have been deployed”, said the US ambassador at large, Beth Van Schaack.
Ukraine will summon the ambassador of Hungary to demand an apology after its prime minister, Viktor Orbán, appeared in public wearing a scarf depicting some Ukrainian territory as part of Hungary, the foreign ministry said.
The Polish president spoke to a hoax caller pretending to be France’s Emmanuel Macron on the night that a missile hit a village near the Ukrainian border, his office has admitted. “Emmanuel, believe me, I am extra careful,” Duda tells the caller in a recording of the call posted on the internet. “I don’t want to have war with Russia and believe me, I am extra careful, extra careful.”
Ukrainian refugees in the UK are experiencing difficulties accessing private rented accommodation because they are unable to secure guarantors or references, the Office for National Statistics has revealed.
The World Health Organization has warned that Ukraine’s health system is “facing its darkest days in the war so far”. The WHO regional director for Europe, Hans Kluge, called for a “humanitarian health corridor” to be created to all areas of Ukraine newly recaptured by Kyiv, as well as those occupied by Russian forces.
Russian troops have been accused of burning bodies at a landfill on the edge of Kherson during their occupation. Residents and workers at the site told the Guardian they saw Russian open trucks arriving to the site carrying black bags that were then set on fire, filling the air with a large cloud of smoke and a stench of burning flesh.
Canada has announced new sanctions against Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko’s administration for supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The foreign ministry said it would sanction 22 more Belarusian officials as well as 16 Belarusian companies involved in military manufacturing, technology, engineering, banking and railway transportation.
The officials included some who were “complicit in the stationing and transport of Russian military personnel and equipment involved in the invasion of Ukraine”.
In a statement, the Canadian foreign minister Mélanie Joly accused Lukashenko’s regime of “letting its territory serve as a launching pad for Russia’s egregious attacks against Ukraine”.
By doing so, Belarus was “enabling the Russian regime’s human rights violations in places such as Bucha, Izium and Mariupol and contributing to the pain and suffering of millions around the globe that has resulted from President Putin’s weaponization of food and energy”, she continued.
