Closing summary
That’s all from today’s shorter-than-usual Ukraine live blog.
Here is a summary of the day’s main events so far:
Blasts were reported across Kyiv on Saturday morning, as the city came under Russian attack for the first time since September
A former Nato secretary general has put forward a proposal for Ukraine to join the military alliance but stripped of the territories occupied by Russia
The UK’s Ministry of Defence says Russia is ramping up its attempt to weaponise history
Trains carrying cargo in Russia’s Ryazan region were derailed Saturday morning due to “unauthorised interference”
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Russian train derails after ‘unauthorised interference’
Trains carrying cargo in Russia’s Ryazan region were derailed on Saturday morning because of “unauthorised interference”, the Associated Press reported Moscow’s rail operator MZhD as saying.
Russian law enforcement said 15 train carriages had been derailed south-east of the capital, while MZhD reported the number as 19.
Several Russian media outlets also reported that an explosion was heard in the vicinity on Saturday morning, although this could not be independently verified by AP.
Russian officials have previously blamed pro-Ukrainian saboteurs for several attacks on the country’s railway system since Moscow invaded Ukraine in February 2022, although no group has claimed responsibility for the damage.
Kyiv has not commented on Saturday’s attacks.
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Russia intensifying weaponisation of history, says UK
In its daily intelligence briefing, the UK’s Ministry of Defence says Russia is ramping up its attempt to weaponise history.
It reports:
Russia’s State Archive Agency has published a collection of documents “On the historical unity of the Russians and Ukrainians”. It opens with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s July 2021 article on the subject, immediately followed by his address on the situation in Ukraine given on 21 February 2022, the eve of the invasion.
The book features 242 documents ranging from the 11th century to the 20th century, which are used to justify the Kremlin’s current policy and support the claim that foreign subversion turned Ukraine into “anti-Russia”.
The documents are accompanied by Putin’s interpretative comments.
Last week former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ostensibly wrote an article on the history of Russo-Polish relations. He accused Poland of conducting an aggressive revisionist “Russophobic” policy, warning this could lead to the destruction of Polish statehood and threatening that Russia and Belarus are able to provide an adequate military response if necessary.
The weaponisation of history by the Russian leadership is intensifying, aimed at inculcating anti-westernism in the minds of the Russian population and intimidating its immediate western neighbours.
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Ex-Nato chief proposes Ukraine joins without Russian-occupied territories
A former Nato secretary general has put forward a proposal for Ukraine to join the military alliance but stripped of the territories occupied by Russia.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen has long worked alongside Andriy Yermak, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, particularly ahead of the last Nato summit in Vilnius this year that ended with no invitation for Ukraine to join.
The two men are again broadly discussing Ukraine’s place in a new European security architecture, including practical questions around the extent of Ukraine’s Nato membership.
Rasmussen, who was Nato’s secretary general between 2009 and 2014, said a plan for partial Ukraine membership would not symbolise a freezing of the conflict, but would instead mark a determination to warn Russia that it cannot prevent Ukraine joining the western defensive alliance.
Nato will hold its 75th anniversary summit in Washington next summer, and the issue of Ukraine’s future membership is bound to be a big topic.
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Last week, the European Commission recommended that formal EU membership negotiations should begin with Ukraine in a move its president, Ursula von der Leyen, described as a response to “the call of history”.
But will Ukraine actually end up becoming a member?
Dermot Hodson, the author of Circle of Stars: A History of the EU and the People Who Made It, has written a piece for the Guardian attempting to answer that question:
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Analysis: Ukraine signals readiness for a long war
Ukraine’s counteroffensive has stalled, with progress on the two principal axes on the southern front modest since it began on 4 June. Kyiv’s forces have advanced about 10km south of Velyka Novosilka and 9km south of Orikhiv and there appears no prospect of a breakthrough as the weather turns.
Last week, the reality was acknowledged by Gen Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander-in-chief of Kyiv’s military. “Just like in the first world war, we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate,” he said in an interview with the Economist, while in a related essay he added that the war, after nearly 21 months of fighting, “is gradually moving to a positional form”.
Ukraine has been unable to break through dense Russian minefields, now laid to a depth of 15 to 20km, Zaluzhnyi said. The Zemledeliye remote truck mine laying system can lay down football fields of mines far faster than dismounted Ukrainian sappers can remove them, and the fear is that with more time Russia can develop a system of deep trenches beyond its existing fortified positions.
“We all hoped we would make more progress than we have,” said Yuriy Sak, a former adviser to Ukraine’s defence ministry. “By now we were hoping we would be in control of Tokmak,” a strategic town on the road to Melitopol, which still lies 20km south of the furthest Ukrainian advance. Breaking Russia’s land bridge at Melitopol would require an advance another 70km south-west.
Read on here:
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Here are some of the latest images coming through from photographers in Ukraine:
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Ukrainian naval drones sank two small Russian landing boats in Crimea, the Reuters news agency reports, while troops braced for further Russian assaults in the east, particularly the shattered town of Avdiivka.
The news agency could not independently verify the report of the attack on Vuzka Bay in the west of Crimea, which one Ukrainian military analyst said was a significant strike and loss for Russia.
There was no immediate comment by Russia, which seized and annexed the Crimea peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 and whose Black Sea Fleet is headquartered in the Crimean city of Sevastopol.
An initial report from Ukraine’s military intelligence said the two small, amphibious Russian ships had been hit overnight.
A Friday evening update from Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said the attack had been carried out by naval drones. It identified one landing craft as an Akula class vessel, the other a Serna class.
The agency said:
The results of intelligence conducted on 10th November 2023 near Vuzka Bay in temporarily occupied Crimea show that after an attack by naval drones, two small Russian landing ships have been destroyed
As a consequence of the attack, both vessels went to the bottom, the Akula straight away and the Serna after attempts to save it.
Kyiv under attack, mayor says
For the first time since September, Ukraine’s capital has been the target of a Russian attack.
Kyiv came under air attack this morning and big explosions were heard, Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said.
There was no immediate information on if there were any casualties.
Strong explosions were heard on in the left bank of the capital. Preliminary, air defence was working against ballistic (missiles).
Air alerts for Kyiv and a nearby region were announced just minutes before the explosions were heard. City authorities urged residents to stay in shelters.
Opening summary
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine.
Two loud explosions have been heard in Kyiv, local media has reported, with the mayor, Vitali Klitschko, urging residents to stay in their shelters.
Air defences were targeting ballistic missiles near the capital, Klitschko wrote on Telegram, adding that several emergency calls had been made but that no victims had so far been found.
The attack came after a long period of calm in the Ukrainian capital. Air defences last downed a missile in Kyiv on 21 September with the falling debris wounding seven people, including a child.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian naval drones sank two small Russian landing boats in Crimea, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said. The attack, which could not be independently verified, sank an Akula class vessel and a Serna class vessel.
The Ukrainian military said the boats were crewed, and loaded with armoured vehicles. “Boats like this are quite a significant loss,” Andriy Ryzhenko, a military analyst and reserve officer, told Radio NV. “They allowed for the transport of a tactical landing force and equipment relatively inconspicuously.”
In other key developments:
Russian forces are fighting to surround the war-battered frontline town of Avdiivka and capture a strategically located factory nearby, a Ukrainian military spokesperson said. Oleksandr Shtupun said Ukrainian forces were repelling Russian assaults on the large chemical plant and that the facility was under their control.
A military analyst, Serhiy Zgurets, writing on the website of Espreso TV, said Russian forces sought to exploit Ukraine’s focus on Avdiivka by attempting to retake areas they had lost near Bakhmut to the north-east. Russian forces seized Bakhmut in May, but Ukrainian troops have since retaken nearby villages.
Russia’s military said its forces had thwarted a Ukrainian attempt to forge a bridgehead on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River and on nearby islands in the Kherson region of southern Ukraine, killing about 500 Ukrainian soldiers in the past week. “On 9 November, personnel from a motorised rifle company in the Russian military grouping ‘Dnipro’ under the command of Senior LieutenantLt Zolto Arsalanov destroyed servicemen from a unit of Ukraine’s 36th Marine Infantry brigade as they were trying to gain a foothold on the left bank of the Dnipro River,” the defence ministry statement said. The claim could not be independently verified.
A European Union plan to spend up to €20bn ($21.4bn) on military aid for Ukraine is meeting resistance from EU countries and may not survive in its current form, diplomats have said, according to Reuters. Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, proposed in July that the bloc create a fund with up to €5bn a year over four years as part of broader western security commitments to bolster Ukraine. But as EU defence ministers prepare to discuss the plan in Brussels on Tuesday, diplomats say multiple countries – including EU heavyweight Germany – have voiced reservations about committing such large sums years in advance.
Hungary’s prime minister said he did not support moving forward on negotiations on Ukraine’s future membership of the EU, signalling again that his country could pose a major roadblock to Kyiv’s ambitions to join the bloc, which must decide unanimously on the admittance of new countries. “The clear Hungarian position is that the negotiations must not begin,” Viktor Orbán said.
Ukrainian and Russian officials said they had agreed to send a Ukrainian teenager, who was taken to Russia during the war last year, back to his home country, in accordance with his wishes. Bohdan Yermokhin, a 17-year-old whose parents died years ago, would be reunited with a cousin “in a third country” on his 18th birthday later this month, with a view to then return to Ukraine, the Russian children’s rights ombudswoman, Maria Lvova-Belova, said in a statement on Friday.
Russian artillery and drone attacks on Friday killed three people and damaged an unspecified infrastructure facility, power lines and a gas pipeline in the Dnipropetrovsk and Kherson regions of Ukraine, local officials said. Both regions have come under regular shelling by Russian troops in occupied territory on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River.
Ukraine’s presidential chief of staff said he hoped a conference on joint Ukrainian-US weapons production would be held in December in the US, Kyiv’s most important supplier of military assistance. “There was a very important agreement between President Zelenskiy and President Biden,” Andriy Yermak said of the Ukrainian and US leaders. “Next month, I hope, a conference will be held in the United States dedicated to joint [weapons] production of Ukraine and the United States.”
A French court rejected an appeal from the Ukrainian government and ruled that Ukrainian billionaire Kostyantyn Zhevago should not be extradited over accusations of embezzlement, a court spokesperson said. Zhevago, who controls London-listed iron pellet producer Ferrexpo, was arrested at a French ski resort in December 2022 at the request of Ukraine, which wants him for alleged embezzlement involving a now-collapsed bank. Zhevago has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
Russia is under no obligation to say where a Ukrainian volunteer soldier convicted and jailed for trying to kill two civilians is being held, the Kremlin said. Human rights groups have demanded that Russia provide information on Maksym Butkevych, whose family and lawyers say they have been unable to establish his whereabouts since August. Butkevych was arrested last year, when his unit was captured on the frontline, and sentenced in March to 13 years in prison.
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