Russia evacuates civilians from Ukraine’s Kherson; Moscow’a forces would be ‘annihilated’ if Putin used nuclear weapons, says EU foreign policy chief
Russia announced it will evacuate residents from Kherson after an appeal from the Russian-installed head of the region, raising fears the occupied city at the heart of the south Ukrainian region will become a new frontline.
Ukraine’s army boasted of territorial gains near the city of Kherson on Wednesday as Nato allies including the UK delivered new air defence systems in the wake of Russia’s recent missile attacks across the country.
The city of Mykolaiv, 60 miles north-west of Kherson city, was pummelled by Russian missiles, with one strike on a five-storey apartment block killing a 31-year-old man and an 80-year-old woman. Five further people were said to still be under rubble. Mykolaiv regional governor, Vitaliy Kim, said an 11-year-old boy was pulled from the rubble after six hours and rescue teams were searching for seven more people.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell warned Moscow that its forces would be “annihilated” by the west’s military response if president Vladimir Putin used nuclear weapons against Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, did not discuss ways to resolve the conflict in Ukraine at their bilateral meeting on Thursday, the state-run RIA news agency reported, citing the Kremlin. Instead, Putin courted Erdoğan with a plan to pump more Russian gas via Turkey that would turn it into a new supply “hub”, bidding to preserve Russia’s energy leverage over Europe.
Russia said it had summoned diplomats from Germany, Denmark and Sweden to complain that representatives from Moscow and Gazprom had not been invited to join an investigation into ruptures of the Nord Stream gas pipelines. “Russia will obviously not recognise the pseudo-results of such an investigation unless Russian experts are involved,” the foreign ministry said.
Russia will run out of supplies and armaments before the west does, the UK defence secretary, Ben Wallace, claimed. He said procurement processes were in place among allies in the west that would ensure that the international community could continue arming Ukraine for years ahead.
Ukrainian officials claimed Iranians in Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine were training Russians in how to use the Iranian-made Shahed-136 drone, which can conduct air-to-surface attacks, electronic warfare and targeting. Their deployment may indicate the Russian military is running out of its own drones.
Moscow has submitted concerns to the United Nations about an agreement on Black Sea grain exports, and is prepared to reject renewing the deal next month unless its demands are addressed, Russia’s Geneva UN ambassador told Reuters.
Ukraine’s power grid has been “stabilised” after Russian strikes that targeted energy infrastructure, causing power and hot water cuts, the national energy operator Ukrenergo said Thursday.
A residential building in the southern Russian city of Belgorod near the Ukraine border was hit Thursday in shelling by Kyiv’s forces, the city governor said today. Mykhaylo Podolyak, a senior Ukrainian presidential adviser, denied Kyiv’s military was responsible and said Russia had tried to shell Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv on the border “but something went wrong”.
The admission of Ukraine to Nato could result in a third world war, the deputy secretary of the Russian security council, Alexander Venediktov, told Russian state Tass news agency in an interview on Thursday.
