Summary
The time in Kyiv is just coming up to 9pm. Here is a roundup of the day’s main stories:
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.
Kherson was cut off from water and electricity supplies on Sunday after an airstrike and damage to the Kakhovka dam, local officials said.
A senior adviser to Ukraine’s president has said Kyiv had never refused to negotiate with Moscow and that it was ready for talks with Russia’s future leader, but not with Vladimir Putin. The comments on Twitter by Mykhailo Podolyak followed a Washington Post report on Saturday saying the Biden administration was privately encouraging Ukraine’s leaders to signal an openness to negotiate with Moscow.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has said 50,000 Russian soldiers called up as part of his mobilisation drive were now fighting with combat units in Ukraine, the Interfax news agency reported. Putin said 80,000 were “in the zone of the special military operation” - the term Russia uses for its war in Ukraine – and the rest of the almost 320,000 draftees were at training camps in Russia.
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 has already 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.
At least 88% of Ukrainians believe their country will be a prosperous member of the European Union in 10 years, according to a poll published by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology. Ukraine applied for membership of the EU shortly after Russia launched a full-scale invasion in February and Kyiv was granted candidate status in June.
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. If it comes to it, we’ll have to move them back to the 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, the governor of Lviv, one of Ukraine’s western-most 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 on 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 on 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 on Tuesday 15 November.
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 as 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 the pro-Putin head of the Russian Orthodox church.
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 he has headed to Egypt and Cop27 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.”
Thanks for following along today. I’ll be back tomorrow but it’s goodbye for now.
Updated
Firefighters work at the scene of a damaged residential building after Russian shelling in liberated Lyman, Donetsk region, earlier today.
