Russia-Ukraine war latest: what we know on day 226 of the invasion
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 on Thursday 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. On Monday, the Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanani denied supplying the drones to Russia, calling the claims “baseless”.
In the northeastern Kharkiv region where Ukrainian forces regained a large swathe of ground in September, the bodies of 534 civilians including 19 children were found after Russian troops left, Serhiy Bolvinov of the National Police in Kharkiv told a briefing. The total included 447 bodies found in Izium. He also said that investigators had found evidence of 22 sites being used as “torture rooms”.
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 sixty years. “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis,” he said. “We’ve got a guy I know fairly well,” Biden said, referring to the Russian president. “He’s not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is, you might say, significantly underperforming.”
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 Center for Civil Liberties. Putin should face an “international tribunal”, the head of Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties said after the award. Writing on Facebook, Oleksandra Matviychuk called on the Russian president, the Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, and other “war criminals” to face an international tribunal in order to “give the hundreds of thousands of victims of war crimes a chance to see justice”. Matviychuk also called for Russia to be excluded from the UN security council “for systematic violations of the UN charter”.
Ukrainian sources are attempting to clarify what President Volodymyr Zelenskiy meant yesterday when he talked about “preventive strikes” being necessary to stop Russia using tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov seized on the comments, interpreting them as a call for Nato to use nuclear weapons against Russia, and said the comments showed why Russia’s “special military operation” within Ukraine’s borders had been necessary. Advisor to Zelenskiy, Serhii Nykyforov, said “Colleagues, you have gone a little too far with your nuclear hysteria and now you hear nuclear strikes even where there are none. The president spoke about the period before 24 February. Then it was necessary to apply preventive measures to prevent Russia from starting the war. Let me remind you that the only measures that were about then were preventive sanctions.”
A member of Vladimir 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.
The headquarters of the armed forces of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) has claimed to have captured three settlements from Ukrainian forces in Donetsk.
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 office of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has issued a brief read-out after he held a call with his Russian counterpart. The pair discussed the latest developments in Ukraine, and Erdoğan repeated Ankara’s willingness to do its part to peacefully resolve the war.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has congratulated Putin on his 70th birthday, applauding him for his “distinguished leadership and strong will” in the latest sign of deepening ties between the two countries. In the birthday message, 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”.
The EU has imposed a new round of sanctions on Russia, expanding import and export bans and blacklisting individuals over Moscow’s annexation of four Ukrainian regions.
Zelenskiy told European heads of state gathered in Prague on Thursday that Ukraine must win so that Russia does not “advance on Warsaw or again on Prague”.
The Russian opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza, who has been imprisoned in Moscow since April, is being investigated for “high treason”, as the authorities step up their case against him for his criticism of the war in Ukraine.
The United States has accused Russian mercenaries of exploiting natural resources in Central African Republic, Mali, Sudan and elsewhere to help fund Moscow’s war in Ukraine, a charge Russia rejected as “anti-Russian rage”. The US ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, has said the Wagner Group of mercenaries are exploiting natural resources and “these ill-gotten gains are used to fund Moscow’s war machine in Africa, the Middle East and Ukraine”.
Ukrainian emergency services said three bodies were pulled from rubble Thursday after a Russian rocket strike destroyed a five-storey apartment block in the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia.
The Kremlin denied reports that 700,000 Russians had fled the country since Moscow announced a mobilisation drive it said would call up hundreds of thousands to fight in Ukraine.
Two Russians who said they fled their country to avoid compulsory military service have requested asylum in the US after landing in a small boat on a remote Alaska island in the Bering Sea, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski’s office said Thursday.
Related: Zelenskiy asks gathering of European leaders for security guarantees
The UN nuclear agency chief travelled to Kyiv to discuss creating a security zone around Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, after Vladimir Putin ordered his government to take it over. “On our way to Kyiv for important meetings,” the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) head, Rafael Grossi, wrote on Twitter, saying the need for a protection zone around the site was “more urgent than ever”. Grossi is also expected to visit Moscow in the coming days to discuss the situation at the plant. The IAEA said it had learned of plans to restart one reactor at the plant, where all six reactors have been shut down for weeks.
Ukraine’s forces are pushing their advance in the east and south, forcing Russian troops to retreat under pressure on both fronts. Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukraine’s military had made major, rapid advances against Russian forces in the past week, taking back dozens of towns in regions in the south and east that Russia has declared annexed. Military experts say Russia is at its weakest point, partly because of its decision not to mobilise earlier and partly because of massive losses of troops and equipment.
Ukraine has extended its area of control in the Kherson region by six to 12 miles, according to its military’s southern command. Zelenskiy confirmed the recapture of the villages of Novovoskresenske, Novohryhorivka and Petropavlivka, saying the settlements were “liberated from the sham referendum and stabilised”, in an address on Wednesday.
Moscow’s forces have left behind smashed towns once under occupation and, in places, mass burial sites and evidence of torture chambers. In Lyman, which was retaken by Ukrainian forces on Sunday, more than 50 graves were found, some marked with names, others with numbers, the Kyiv-based outlet Hromadske reported on Wednesday.
