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A summary of today's developments
More than 6m households in Ukraine are still affected by power cuts, two days after targeted Russian strikes on the country’s energy infrastructure, president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said.
Russian shelling on the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson killed 15 civilians on Friday, officials said, as engineers across the country sought to restore heat, water and power to major cities. Thirty-five people had been injured, including a child, and several “private houses and high-rise buildings” damaged, city official Galyna Lugova said. The shelling of Kherson, a key eastern city recently recaptured by Ukrainian forces, was the deadliest Russian bombardment in recent days.
Ukraine’s national police chief, Ihor Klymenko, said 32 civilians had been killed in Kherson since 9 November, when Russian forces were forced to withdraw from the city that they had occupied for eight months, the Kyiv Independent reports.Since then, Russian troops have shelled Kherson frequently
Ukraine accused the Kremlin of reviving the “genocidal” tactics of Josef Stalin as Kyiv commemorated a Soviet-era famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the winter of 1932-33.
The prime ministers of Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine – Ingrida Šimonytė, Mateusz Morawiecki and Denys Shmyhal, respectively – met in Kyiv on Saturday for talks to discuss and reiterate their commitment to work together “in countering Russia’s armed aggression”.
Belarus’s foreign minister, Vladimir Makei, has died. Belarus has been an ally of Russia and a base for the invasion over the border in February. Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova posted on her Telegram channel: “We are shocked by the reports of the death of the Head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Belarus Vladimir Makei.”
