Summary
It’s 11pm in Kyiv. Here’s where things stand:
France’s prestigious Bayeux War Correspondents’ Awards on Saturday largely honoured reporting on the Ukraine conflict, with Associated Press and Burkina Faso newspaper Sidwaya among the recipients. The photo prize went to Ukrainian photographer Evgeniy Maloletka for his work with video journalist Mstyslav Chernov on the fall of Mariupol for AP.
The death toll from Russia’s attack on Zaporizhzhia has increased to 19, Ukrinform reports. According to the outlet, the body of the 19th victim was discovered underneath the rubble on Saturday.
The Ukrainian GDP has shrunk by 30% in nine months, the ministry of economy announced on Saturday. “Among the negative factors that affected the economy, the weather and the actions of the occupiers stand out. Due to prolonged rainy weather in some regions in September, the pace of grain crop harvesting slowed down, which negatively affected the volume of harvested products,” the ministry said.
An adviser to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy posted a message on Twitter saying the explosion which damaged Russia’s road-and-rail bridge to Crimea was just “the beginning”. “Everything illegal must be destroyed, everything that is stolen must be returned to Ukraine, everything occupied by Russia must be expelled,” Mykhailo Podolyak wrote.
Petro Kotin, the head of Ukraine’s state nuclear company Energoatom, warned the diesel generators at Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant only have a limited supply of fuel at present. Overnight shelling cut power to the plant, which needs cooling to avoid a meltdown, forcing it to switch to emergency generators.
Ukraine is “very lucky” to have friends across Scotland, delegates at the SNP annual party conference have been told. Ukrainian MP Lesia Vasylenko addressed delegates in Aberdeen on Saturday, where she thanked the people of Scotland for providing humanitarian aid and taking in refugees from her country during the Russian invasion.
Updated
France’s prestigious Bayeux War Correspondents’ Awards on Saturday largely honoured reporting on the Ukraine conflict, with Associated Press and Burkina Faso newspaper Sidwaya among the recipients.
Agence France-Presse reports:
Instituted in 1994, the Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Awards have honoured exceptional reporting on war and unrest.
The choice of Bayeux is significant as it was the first French town to be liberated by the Allied forces during World War II.
With the exception of the Burkina Faso award, all the prize-winners were awarded for their coverage of the war in Ukraine.
The photo prize went to Ukrainian photographer Evgeniy Maloletka for his work with video journalist Mstyslav Chernov on the fall of Mariupol for AP.
The written press prize went to Mariam Ouedraogo of Sidwaya for her reporting in Burkina Faso, which has suffered two coups this year.
In television, Theo Maneval and Pierre Dehoorne won the first Amnesty International prize for “Viktor and the kiss of war” in Ukraine for France 5, with the large-format prize going to Philip Cox of the Guardian for “The Spiderman of Sudan”.
For radio, the international jury awarded the prize to Maurine Mercier, who recorded the testimony of a mother and her daughter on “two weeks of rape and terror in Bucha”, also in Ukraine, for France Info - RTS.
Updated
The death toll from Russia’s attack on Zaporizhzhia has increased to 19, Ukrinform reports.
According to the outlet, the body of the 19th victim was discovered underneath the rubble on Saturday.
The death toll was previously reported at 14 when Russia’s “kamikaze-drones” hit several residential buildings killing a child on Thursday.
Updated
The Ukrainian air force has shot down an Iranian-made Shahed-136 combat drone with a machine gun on Saturday, Euromaidan reports.
Ukrainian Air Force brings down Shahed-136 combat drone with machine gun
— Euromaidan Press (@EuromaidanPress) October 8, 2022
The Iranian-made drone was shot down with an Utios large-caliber machine gun in Mykolaiv Oblast, the Air Command South reportedhttps://t.co/yy8rVeLyvu pic.twitter.com/HnJrLDbqHl
Updated
The Ukrainian GDP has shrunk by 30% in nine months, the ministry of economy announced on Saturday.
In a statement, the ministry said:
Among the negative factors that affected the economy, the weather and the actions of the occupiers stand out. Due to prolonged rainy weather in some regions in September, the pace of grain crop harvesting slowed down, which negatively affected the volume of harvested products.”
“In addition, the unstable operation and periodic disconnections of the occupied ZANP [Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant] from the energy system of Ukraine made it necessary to redistribute the load among other participants in the system, which exerted significant pressure on the entire Ukrainian energy system.”
Updated
An adviser to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy posted a message on Twitter saying the explosion which damaged Russia*s road-and-rail bridge to Crimea was just “the beginning”.
“Everything illegal must be destroyed, everything that is stolen must be returned to Ukraine, everything occupied by Russia must be expelled,” Mykhailo Podolyak wrote.
He told Reuters he believed the blast had been arranged by Russia, although he did not say how he knew.
“This is a concrete manifestation of the conflict between the FSB (intelligence service) and (private military companies) on the one hand and the Ministry of Defence/General Staff of the Russian Federation on the other,” he said.
Trains can resume using a road-and-rail bridge between Russia and Crimea after it was damaged in an explosion earlier, Russia’s transport ministry said in a statement, Reuters reports.
Petro Kotin, the head of Ukraine’s state nuclear company Energoatom, warned the diesel generators at Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant only have a limited supply of fuel at present.
Overnight shelling cut power to the plant, which needs cooling to avoid a meltdown, forcing it to switch to emergency generators.
Kotin told BBC World News: “Right now we are working on logistics to supply more fuel for these generators.
“If [the generators] run out of fuel, after that they will stop, and after that there will be a disaster ... there will be a melting of the active core and a release of radioactivity from there.”
Updated
Ukraine is “very lucky” to have friends across Scotland, delegates at the SNP annual party conference have been told.
Ukrainian MP Lesia Vasylenko addressed delegates in Aberdeen on Saturday, where she thanked the people of Scotland for providing humanitarian aid and taking in refugees from her country during the Russian invasion.
Vasylenko said: “It’s a great honour to be here on the stage, addressing your 88th conference of the Scottish National party.
“It’s an even bigger honour for me to be representing the people of Ukraine up on this stage. It’s just that I wish I was addressing you today as Lesia Vasylenko, member of parliament of Ukraine, chair of the environmental sub-committee on climate change, talking about Ukraine’s input and impact in dealing with global challenges.
“Instead, I am addressing you today as Lesia Vasylenko, member of a wartime parliament of Ukraine that is fighting very hard for its existence and for the physical survival of its people.
“That is first and foremost, but of course we are also fighting to defend the very meaning of the concepts of freedom, democracy and human rights.”
Vasylenko also drew praise from the party’s Westminster leader, Ian Blackford.
In his speech to the conference later in the day, Blackford praised her “courage”, adding: “Today we renew our support for Lesia and for her nation - but we also renew our opposition to the Russian aggression, the oppression, and the illegal annexation of their country.
“Today, tomorrow and every day in the future – Scotland stands with the people of Ukraine.”
Blackford also told delegates “the international community must not rest until the war criminal Putin is put in front of the international court in the Hague, where he belongs”.
Updated
Fears that Russia is navigating its way around sanctions are unfounded, according to experts who say Moscow is suffering a bigger hit than institutions such as the World Bank have been predicting.
Some analysts have interpreted the strength of the rouble, the size of the warchest of cash available to Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin’s ability to redirect exports destined for Europe to willing southern neighbours as a signal that the arsenal of sanctions deployed against Moscow is failing to bite.
But the economist Mikhail Mamonov thinks otherwise. He was part of a team that modelled the Russian economy in 2014. It measured the impact of sanctions in the wake of Putin’s annexation of Crimea, and revealed that even the minimal financial and trade blockade imposed at the time had had an impact.”
Updated
Summary
The time in Kyiv is 6pm. Here is a round-up of the day’s headlines so far:
Three people were killed after a truck bomb caused a fire and the collapse of a section of a bridge linking Russia with Crimea, Russian officials said. Russia’s national anti-terrorism committee said the truck bomb set alight seven railway carriages carrying fuel, resulting in a “partial collapse of two sections of the bridge.
Meanwhile, Russia’s defence ministry said Russian troops fighting in the Mykolaiv, Kryvyi Rih and Zaporizhzhia regions of southern Ukraine could receive all the supplies they needed via existing land and sea corridors. Saturday’s explosion on the road-and-rail bridge, which has been used to take Russian personnel and military supplies through the peninsula into other parts of southern Ukraine, brought down sections of road taking traffic in one direction and also damaged railway tracks.
The parliamentary leader of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s party has stopped short of claiming that Kyiv was responsible for the Kerch bridge explosion but appeared to cast it as a consequence of Moscow’s takeover of Crimea and attempts to integrate the peninsula with the Russian mainland. “Russian illegal construction is starting to fall apart and catch fire. The reason is simple: if you build something explosive, then sooner or later it will explode,” David Arakhamia, the leader of the Servant of the People party, wrote on Telegram.
The series of explosions that rocked Kharkiv early on Saturday sparked a fire at one of the city’s medical institutions, the mayor of the eastern Ukrainian city said. Ihor Terekhov said on Telegram that the explosions were the result of missile strikes in the city centre, Associated Press reported. They also sparked a fire in a non-residential building.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy says Russian officials have begun to “prepare their society” for the possible use of nuclear weapons in the war. The Ukrainian president denied having called for strikes on Russia, urging instead that pre-emptive sanctions be imposed on Moscow, in an interview with the BBC.
Russia has targeted Zaporizhzhia with explosive-packed “kamikaze drones” for the first time, as the death toll from a missile strike on an apartment building in the city rose to 11. The regional governor, Oleksandr Starukh, said Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones damaged two infrastructure facilities in the city. He said other missiles also struck the city again, injuring one person. The Iranian foreign ministry has denied supplying the drones to Russia.
Russia has named a new senior commander of Russian forces in Ukraine. Sergei Surovikin, the former commander of Russia’s operations in Syria, is “a notoriously corrupt and brutal general even by the Russian army’s standards, according to the UK MoD”, reports the FT’s Moscow bureau chief.
The German defence minister has told Nato it must do more to bolster security, warning: “We cannot know how far Putin’s delusions of grandeur can go.” Christine Lambrecht said Germany had heard of Russian threats to Lithuania for implementing EU sanctions and that they must be taken seriously and be prepared, reports Reuters.
The UN atomic watchdog has renewed calls for a protection zone at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, condemning overnight shelling on its power line as “tremendously irresponsible”. The shelling cut the power line that supplies cooling systems to the Russian-held plant, reports Reuters.
The UK has rejected Moscow’s call for a secret ballot in the United Nations general assembly next week on whether to condemn Russia’s move to annex four regions in Ukraine and requested that the 193-member body vote publicly. Reuters reports that the general assembly is set to vote on a draft resolution that would condemn Russia’s “illegal so-called referenda” and the “attempted illegal annexation”.
Vladimir Putin marked his 70th birthday on Friday with little fanfare, amid further signs that key parts of the Russian president’s invasion of Ukraine were unravelling and triggering unprecedented criticism at home, Reuters reports. News programs made only passing references to the birthday and public events were low-key, in contrast to just a week ago when Putin held a huge concert on Red Square to proclaim the annexation of nearly a fifth of Ukrainian land.
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 Ukraine.
Russia’s transport ministry has said that limited road traffic for cars and buses had resumed on intact lanes of the Kerch bridge, which was hit by an explosion early in the morning.
It said traffic would for now be restricted to crossing between Crimea and the Russian Taman peninsula in alternating directions.
Sergei Aksyonov, the Russian-appointed governor of the Crimean peninsula, which Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014, said on social media that heavy goods vehicles would have to wait to cross by ferry.
Updated
The series of explosions that rocked Kharkiv early on Saturday sparked a fire at one of the city’s medical institutions, the mayor of the eastern Ukrainian city said.
Ihor Terekhov said on Telegram that the explosions were the result of missile strikes in the city centre, Associated Press reported. They also sparked a fire in a non-residential building.
There were no immediate reports of casualties after the blasts, which set off a series of secondary explosions.
Russia names new senior commander of forces in Ukraine
Russia has named a new senior commander of Russian forces in Ukraine.
Sergei Surovikin, the former commander of Russia’s operations in Syria, is “a notoriously corrupt and brutal general even by the Russian army’s standards, according to the UK MoD”, reports the FT’s Moscow bureau chief.
Russia's "special military operation" has yet another new senior commander: Sergei Surovikin, former commander of Russia's intervention in Syria.
— max seddon (@maxseddon) October 8, 2022
He's a notoriously corrupt and brutal general even by the Russian army's standards, according to the UK MOD. https://t.co/B93Zln0iW2
Updated
Russia has reportedly said that road traffic will soon resume on parts of the damaged Crimean bridge.
The Russian transport ministry said the bridge would shortly reopen to road traffic on undamaged lanes, reports Reuters.
Updated
Germany warns Nato must do more to bolster security
The German defence minister has told Nato it must do more to bolster security, warning: “We cannot know how far Putin’s delusions of grandeur can go.”
Christine Lambrecht said Germany had heard of Russian threats to Lithuania for implementing EU sanctions and that they must be taken seriously and be prepared, reports Reuters.
Speaking during a visit to German troops deployed in Lithuania, Lambrecht said on Saturday:
The fact is that we, Nato, must do more for our common security because we cannot know how far Putin’s delusions of grandeur can go.
She added:
We’ve heard Russia’s threats to Lithuania which was implementing European sanctions on the border with Kaliningrad. This is not nearly the first threats and we must take them seriously and be prepared.
Updated
Iuliia Mendel, the former spokesperson of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has shared what appears to be footage from the damaged bridge between Crimea and Russia.
The footage has not been independently verified by the Guardian.
Here how it looks now pic.twitter.com/NVPeWopUeA
— Iuliia Mendel (@IuliiaMendel) October 8, 2022
Updated
The UN atomic watchdog has renewed calls for a protection zone at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, condemning overnight shelling on its power line as “tremendously irresponsible”.
The shelling cut the power line that supplies cooling systems to the Russian-held plant, reports Reuters.
“The resumption of shelling, hitting the plant’s sole source of external power, is tremendously irresponsible,” Rafael Grossi, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency said, confirming that it is now dependent on diesel generators.
The agency said that Grossi would visit Russia and Ukraine soon to discuss establishing a protection zone.
Railway traffic on a damaged road and rail bridge linking Russia and the Crimean peninsula will resume at 8pm local time, the Interfax news agency reported, citing Russia’s transport ministry.
A huge blast that brought down part of the bridge’s roadway had occurred at around 6am.
Updated
Three people killed in bridge explosion, says Russia
Three people were killed after a truck bomb caused a fire and the collapse of a section of a bridge linking Russia with Crimea, Russian officials said.
Russia’s national anti-terrorism committee said the truck bomb set alight seven railway carriages carrying fuel, resulting in a “partial collapse of two sections of the bridge”.
A man and a woman who were riding in a vehicle across the bridge were killed by the explosion and their bodies were recovered, Russia’s investigative committee said. It did not provide details on the third victim.
Meanwhile, Russia’s defence ministry said Russian troops fighting in the Mykolaiv, Kryvyi Rih and Zaporizhzhia regions of southern Ukraine could receive all the supplies they needed via existing land and sea corridors.
Saturday’s explosion on the road-and-rail bridge, which has been used to take Russian personnal and military supplies through the peninsula into other parts of southern Ukraine, brought down sections of road taking traffic in one direction and also damaged railway tracks.
Updated
CCTV footage appears to show the moment the bridge linking Crimea and Russia was hit by a huge explosion early on Saturday morning.
Elizabeth Tsurkov, a fellow at the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, a thinktank based in Washington DC tweeted that Russia was claiming just months ago that the Kerch bridge could not be attacked.
She wrote:
Only 3 months ago, Russian propaganda was claiming that the Crimea bridge was impossible to attack because of 20 different modes of protection covering it, including military dolphins. What a colossal failure.
Only 3 months ago, Russian propaganda was claiming that the Crimea bridge was impossible to attack because of 20 different modes of protection covering it, including military dolphins (#17) https://t.co/gJdON9o4Vl What a colossal failure pic.twitter.com/70ZrQoKXYb
— Elizabeth Tsurkov🌻 (@Elizrael) October 8, 2022
A truck bomb earlier today caused a fire and the collapse of a section of the bridge linking Russia-annexed Crimea with Russia, Russian officials said, damaging a key supply artery for Moscow’s faltering war effort in southern Ukraine.
The speaker of Crimea’s Kremlin-backed regional parliament immediately accused Ukraine, though the Kremlin did not apportion blame. Ukrainian officials have repeatedly threatened to strike the bridge and some lauded the attack, but Kyiv stopped short of claiming responsibility.
Updated
At least three spans of the Kerch bridge collapsed following the blasts earlier on Saturday, according to Bellingcat’s Nick Waters.
In a short thread on Twitter, he highlighted the areas of damage caused by the explosion.
I’ve been looking at the Kerch Strait bridge explosion and thought I’d make a thread of things I’ve noticed.
— Nick Waters (@N_Waters89) October 8, 2022
Firstly: the explosion affected the Ukraine-bound lane of the bridge at approximately 45.300105, 36.513240. pic.twitter.com/AgkUvfP4Kr
It seems at least three spans of the bridge have collapsed. Two at the location where a train is burning (location 1), and another further to the east (location 2). pic.twitter.com/aIz0rl48kf
— Nick Waters (@N_Waters89) October 8, 2022
The most significant damage took place at Location 1.
— Nick Waters (@N_Waters89) October 8, 2022
Many have noted that at the moment of detonation, a large truck had just driven onto this span, which may or may not be an important point. pic.twitter.com/VdRWnHV3GX
The parliamentary leader of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s party has stopped short of claiming that Kyiv was responsible for the Kerch bridge explosion but appeared to cast it as a consequence of Moscow’s takeover of Crimea and attempts to integrate the peninsula with the Russian mainland.
“Russian illegal construction is starting to fall apart and catch fire. The reason is simple: if you build something explosive, then sooner or later it will explode,” David Arakhamia, the leader of the Servant of the People party, wrote on Telegram.
“And this is just the beginning. Of all things, reliable construction is not something Russia is particularly famous for,” he said.
Other Ukrainian officials were more celebratory while still stopping short of claiming responsibility, AP reported. The secretary of Ukraine’s National security and defense council, Oleksiy Danilov, posted a video in his Twitter with Kerch bridge on fire on the left side and video with Marilyn Monroe singing her famous “Happy Birthday Mr President” on the right side.
In Moscow, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that “the reaction of the Kyiv regime to the destruction of civilian infrastructure shows its terrorist nature”.
In August, Russia suffered a series of explosions at an airbase and munitions depot in Crimea, which underlined its vulnerability.
Updated
Twelve miles long and taller than the Statue of Liberty, the Kerch bridge project to the occupied Crimean peninsular was the jewel in the crown of Vladimir Putin’s infrastructure projects – described in the Russian media as the “construction of the century”.
When the Russian president opened its road span on 15 May 2018, driving an orange Kamaz truck across the bridge, he boasted of its significance.
“In different historical epochs, even under the tsar priests, people dreamed of building this bridge. Then they returned to this [idea] in the 1930s, the 40s, the 50s. And finally, thanks to your work and your talent, the miracle has happened.”
Heavily defended since the start of Russia’s fulls scale invasion of Ukraine, it was seen as important enough for Moscow to warn of reprisals if the bridge was targeted.
But on Saturday morning, in circumstances that are still unclear, a huge explosion rocked the Kerch bridge, collapsing part of the road carriageway into the Kerch Strait below and setting fire to fuel tankers on a train crossing the second railway span of the bridge.
The enormous significance of the damage to the bridge, obliquely claimed by a senior adviser to the Ukrainian presidency, will become clear in the coming hours and days – not least whether Moscow feels compelled to retaliate for the attack.
Updated
UK opposes Russian call for UN secret ballot
The UK has rejected Moscow’s call for a secret ballot in the United Nations general assembly next week on whether to condemn Russia’s move to annex four regions in Ukraine and requested that the 193-member body vote publicly.
Reuters reports that the general assembly is set to vote on a draft resolution that would condemn Russia’s “illegal so-called referenda” and the “attempted illegal annexation”. It also reaffirms the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine, and calls on states not to recognise Russia’s move.
Moscow last week moved to annex the four Ukraine regions – Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia – after staging the “referendums” that have been denounced by Ukraine and its allies as illegal and coercive.
In a letter to UN states earlier this week, Russia’s UN ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, lobbied for a secret ballot, arguing that western lobbying meant that “it may be very difficult if positions are expressed publicly”.
Britain’s UN ambassador, Barbara Woodward, said on Friday that the rules of the general assembly were clear that any representative may request a recorded vote.
She wrote to the general assembly president:
To conduct a secret ballot on a general assembly decision would go against decades of precedent and undermine the practices of the world’s most representative deliberative body.
A truck bomb has caused the fire and collapse of a section of a bridge linking Russia with Crimea, according to Russian authorities.
The National Anti-Terrorism Committee said the bomb set alight seven railway carriages carrying fuel, resulting in a “partial collapse of two sections of the bridge”.
The committee did not immediately apportion blame, the Associated Press reported. Putin was informed about the explosion and ordered the creation of a government panel to deal with the emergency.
The 12-mile bridge across the Kerch Strait linking the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov is the longest in Europe.
It cost billions of pounds to build and it has provided an essential link to the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
Ukrainian officials have repeatedly threatened to strike the bridge.
Updated
Damage caused by the explosion on Kerch bridge earlier today.
Here is some more footage of the moment of the blast on the Kerch bridge from Russia to Crimea, a hated symbol of the Kremlin’s occupation of the southern Ukrainian peninsular.
Images from the bridge showed a fiercely burning fire engulfing at least two railway carriages from a train on the bridge, accompanied by a vast column of black smoke, and one half of the parallel road bridge collapsed into the Kerch Strait.
The explosion, which witnesses said could be heard kilometres away, took place before 6am on Saturday while a train was crossing the bridge.
Better footage of the explosion. https://t.co/iulzZ60vLS pic.twitter.com/0cvsxw4be2
— Rob Lee (@RALee85) October 8, 2022
Another video of damage to the bridge from this morning. https://t.co/0MEUA1VBXC pic.twitter.com/cgQtCwJqeC
— Rob Lee (@RALee85) October 8, 2022
Bridge explosion 'the beginning', says Ukrainian presidential adviser
A Ukrainian presidential adviser posted a message on Twitter after conflicting reports of an explosion or fire on Saturday that damaged the bridge connecting the Russian mainland to the occupied Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, calling it “the beginning” but not directly claiming Ukrainian responsibility.
“Everything illegal must be destroyed, everything stolen must be returned to Ukraine, everything occupied by Russia must be expelled,” Mykhailo Podolyak wrote.
Crimea, the bridge, the beginning. Everything illegal must be destroyed, everything stolen must be returned to Ukraine, everything occupied by Russia must be expelled. pic.twitter.com/yUiSwOLlDP
— Михайло Подоляк (@Podolyak_M) October 8, 2022
Updated
Vladimir Putin marked his 70th birthday on Friday with little fanfare, amid further signs that key parts of the Russian president’s invasion of Ukraine were unravelling and triggering unprecedented criticism at home, Reuters reports.
News programs made only passing references to the birthday and public events were low-key, in contrast to just a week ago when Putin held a huge concert on Red Square to proclaim the annexation of nearly a fifth of Ukrainian land.
Putin was shown on state television meeting leaders of other former Soviet allies at an informal summit in St Petersburg.
Huge blast on Crimea bridge to Russia
The Kerch bridge from Russia to Crimea – a hated symbol of the Kremlin’s occupation of the southern Ukrainian peninsular – has been hit by a massive explosion on the span that carries railway traffic.
Images from the bridge showed a fiercely burning fire engulfing at least two railway carriages from a train on the bridge, accompanied by a vast column of black smoke.
The explosion, which witnesses said could be heard kilometres away, took place around 6am on Saturday while a train was crossing the bridge, although it was not immediately clear what caused it.
Some images appeared to show a second fire at some distance from the main blaze. Later images also appeared to show that part of road bridge that runs parallel with the train tracks had collapsed.
Peter Beaumont in Kyiv has the story:
Summary
A series of explosions shook Kharkiv early on Saturday, sending towering plumes of smoke into the sky and triggering a series of secondary explosions in the eastern Ukraine city. Associated Press reported there were no immediate reports of casualties. The blasts came hours after Russia concentrated attacks on areas it illegally annexed.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy says Russian officials have begun to “prepare their society” for the possible use of nuclear weapons in the war. The Ukrainian president denied having called for strikes on Russia, urging instead that pre-emptive sanctions be imposed on Moscow, in an interview with the BBC.
Russia has targeted Zaporizhzhia with explosive-packed “kamikaze drones” for the first time, as the death toll from a missile strike on an apartment building in the city rose to 11. The regional governor, Oleksandr Starukh, said Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones damaged two infrastructure facilities in the city. He said other missiles also struck the city again, injuring one person. The Iranian foreign ministry has denied supplying the drones to Russia.
The Russian justice ministry has declared one of the country’s most popular rappers to be a “foreign agent”, a designation that has been used to harass Kremlin critics and journalists. Oxxxymiron – real name Miron Fyodorov – was added to a list of foreign agents alongside four journalists and Dmitry Glukhovsky, a prominent writer. The rapper has called the Kremlin’s Ukraine offensive a “catastrophe and a crime”.
Ukrainian authorities found a mass grave in the recently recaptured eastern town of Lyman in Donetsk and it was unclear yet how many bodies it held, the regional governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said in an online post on Friday. Separately, the Ukrinform news agency cited a senior police official as saying the grave contained 180 bodies.
The bodies of 534 civilians including 19 children were found in the north-eastern Kharkiv region since Russian troops left, Serhiy Bolvinov of the national police in Kharkiv said. That included 447 bodies found in Izium. He also said investigators had found evidence of 22 sites being used as “torture rooms”.
Russia has reportedly sacked the commander of its eastern military district, Col Gen Alexander Chaiko, the news outlet RBC has reported. His reported departure marks the latest in a series of top officials to be fired after defeats and humiliations in the war in Ukraine.
Joe Biden has warned the world could face “Armageddon” if Vladimir Putin uses a tactical nuclear weapon to try to win the war in Ukraine. The US president made his most outspoken remarks to date about the threat of nuclear war, saying it was the closest the world had come to nuclear catastrophe for 60 years, “since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis”.
The US does not have indications that Russia is preparing to imminently use nuclear weapons, the White House said. Asked about Biden’s comments, White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said: “He was reinforcing what we have been saying, which is how seriously ... we take these threats.”
The 2022 Nobel peace prize has been awarded to human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski from Belarus, the Russian human rights organisation Memorial and the Ukrainian human rights organisation Centre for Civil Liberties. Oleksandra Matviychuk, the centre’s head, said on Facebook after the award that Vladimir Putin as well as the Belarusian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, and other “war criminals” should face an international tribunal, and Russia should be excluded from the UN security council “for systematic violations of the UN charter”.
The International Monetary Fund has announced it will provide $1.3bn in emergency aid to Ukraine through its new food crisis assistance program.
A member of Putin’s inner circle directly confronted the Russian president over mistakes and failings in the war in Ukraine, the Washington Post has reported, citing US intelligence.
At least five people were killed and as many injured after Ukrainian forces struck a bus while shelling a strategically important bridge in the Russian-controlled part of Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, Russia’s Tass news agency has reported.
The armed forces’ headquarters of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic has claimed to have captured three settlements from Ukrainian forces in Donetsk.
The office of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said after a call with Putin that the pair discussed the latest developments in Ukraine, and Erdoğan repeated Ankara’s willingness to do its part to peacefully resolve the war.
The North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, has congratulated Putin on his 70th birthday, applauding him for his “distinguished leadership and strong will”. Kim spoke of Putin’s achievements in “building powerful Russia” and said the Russian leader was “enjoying high respects and support from the broad masses of people”.
