Russia launches 70 missiles in ‘large-scale attack on critical facilities’; cyber-attack hits European parliament after MEPs declare Russia a state sponsor of terrorism
The death toll from today’s Russian strikes across Ukraine has risen to seven, according to officials.
Oleksii Kuleba, the head of Kyiv region military administration, said four people had died in the Kyiv region.
Mayor Vitali Klitschko said at least three people had died after the attack on the capital.
It’s slightly past midnight in Kyiv. Here’s a look at the biggest developments throughout the day:
UN political affairs chief Rosemary DiCarlo told the UN security council on Wednesday that an exchange of 35 Russian and 36 Ukrainian prisoners was a positive development amid the “dark news” of Russian strikes on Ukraine. DiCarlo encouraged the parties to continue prisoner releases and follow international humanitarian law in relation to prisoners of war, Reuters reports.
A Russian court on Wednesday extended by six months the detention of opposition politician Ilya Yashin, who risks being jailed for 10 years for denouncing president Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine. The 39-year-old Moscow city councillor is in the dock as part of an unprecedented crackdown on dissent in Russia, with most opposition activists either in jail or in exile. He faces up to 10 years behind bars, if convicted.
The Kremlin said on Wednesday it had faith in the “success” of its offensive in Ukraine. “The future and the success of the special operation are beyond doubt,” the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said on a visit to Armenia, using the official Moscow term to describe Russia’s assault, Agence France-Presse reports.
European cities were urged to send spare generators to Ukraine to help the country through the winter in the face of Russia’s attacks on electricity infrastructure. Ukraine’s power grid came under bombardment again as the European parliament president, Roberta Metsola, launched an appeal to get generators to Ukraine.
Dozens of Russian missiles were launched against Ukraine on Wednesday morning, with explosions heard in Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions. Russian forces launched 70 missiles at Ukraine in its latest “large-scale attack on crucial infrastructure facilities,” Ukraine’s armed forces said. Air raid alerts were heard across all over the country.
At least seven people have been killed – including a 17-year-old girl – and 36 injured after a Russian missile strike in Kyiv, according to officials. Oleksii Kuleba, head of the regional military administration, said the entire Kyiv region was without electricity after Moscow’s airstrikes targeted critical infrastructure.
The mayor of Lviv, Andriy Sadovyi, has said the entire western Ukrainian city is “without light” after Russian strikes. Sadovyi warned that there would be “interruptions” with the city’s water supply and that he was awaiting additional information from energy experts.
Ukraine’s state-run nuclear energy firm, Energoatom, has said power units of three Ukrainian nuclear power plants were switched off after Russian missile strikes across the country. In a statement, it said “due to a decrease in frequency in the energy system of Ukraine” emergency protection was activated at the Rivne, Pivdennoukrainsk and Khmelnytskyi nuclear power plants.
The European parliament came under “sophisticated cyber-attacks” officials said, hours after it voted to declare Russia a state sponsor of terrorism. The president of the European parliament, Roberta Metsola, said a pro-Kremlin group has claimed responsibility for the denial of service attack on the European parliament’s website.
The European parliament has declared Russia “a terrorist regime” over its brutal war on Ukraine. In a non-binding resolution approved by a large majority of MEPs, the European parliament urged the EU’s 27 member states to make the same designation “with all the negative consequences this implies”. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, welcomed the declaration.
The US has announced a new $400m (£332.5m) aid package to Ukraine which will include weapons, munitions and air defence equipment. The package also includes more than 200 generators to help Ukraine deal with power outages caused by Russian attacks on energy infrastructure.
UN political affairs chief Rosemary DiCarlo told the UN security council on Wednesday that an exchange of 35 Russian and 36 Ukrainian prisoners was a positive development amid the “dark news” of Russian strikes on Ukraine.
DiCarlo, addressing a meeting of the council requested by Ukraine, encouraged the parties to continue prisoner releases and follow international humanitarian law in relation to prisoners of war, Reuters reports.
A Russian court on Wednesday extended by six months the detention of opposition politician Ilya Yashin, who risks being jailed for 10 years for denouncing president Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine.
The 39-year-old Moscow city councillor is in the dock as part of an unprecedented crackdown on dissent in Russia, with most opposition activists either in jail or in exile.
He faces up to 10 years behind bars, if convicted.
Yashin refused to leave after Putin sent troops to Ukraine on 24 February and regularly took to his YouTube channel, which has 1.3 million subscribers, to condemn his country’s offensive.
Yashin insisted in court that he would not flee the country, but the judge extended his detention by six months.
I love my country and in order to live here I am ready to pay with my freedom,” he said, adding, “I am a Russian patriot,” Agence France-Presse reports.
Prosecutors argued that Yashin should be kept in detention because he had “inflicted considerable damage to Russia” and “increased political tensions during the special military operation” – Russia’s term for its invasion of Ukraine.
One of the opposition activist’s lawyers, Vadim Prokhorov, said that extending Yashin’s detention until 10 May was against the law.
The next hearing is expected to take place on 29 November.
Yashin is an ally of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny and was close to Boris Nemtsov, an opposition politician assassinated near the Kremlin in 2015.
France and Spain on Wednesday lambasted the European Commission’s proposed price cap on wholesale natural gas, set so high that critics have questioned if it would ever be used.
Agence France-Presse reports:
The EU executive on Tuesday unveiled a gas “safety ceiling” of 275 euros per megawatt hour as the bloc grapples with high energy prices spurred by Moscow’s war in Ukraine and supply cuts.
But the conditions meant the cap would only kick in when EU gas prices breach that threshold for two weeks running, calculated on advance purchases through the bloc’s main gas price benchmark, TTF.
The cap was also contingent on the TTF price for liquefied natural gas – an easily transportable form of gas that can be shipped worldwide – exceeding 58 euros for 10 days within that same two-week period.
The only time the TTF gas price has gone above the 275-euro limit was between August 22 and 29 this year.
It was running at around 120 euros in trading on Tuesday.
Spanish ecological transition minister Teresa Ribera called the commission’s proposal a “joke”, saying it would cause steeper price hikes and hamper efforts to tame decades-high inflation.
The French energy transition ministry criticised an “insufficient” scheme that “does not respond to the reality of the market”.
“The commission must propose an operational text, not simply a text that is political grandstanding and may have negative or no effects,” it said.
The Kremlin said on Wednesday it had faith in the “success” of its offensive in Ukraine.
The future and the success of the special operation are beyond doubt,” the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said on a visit to Armenia, using the official Moscow term to describe Russia’s assault, Agence France-Presse reports.
He spoke to reporters as the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, was set to address an urgent meeting of the UN security council later on Wednesday and after the European parliament recognised Russia as a “state sponsor of terrorism”.
Peskov did not address the symbolic political step of the European legislators.
But Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova earlier in the day said on messaging app Telegram:
I propose designating the European parliament as a sponsor of idiocy,” she said.
European cities were urged to send spare generators to Ukraine to help the country through the winter in the face of Russia’s attacks on electricity infrastructure.
Ukraine’s power grid came under bombardment again as the European parliament president, Roberta Metsola, launched an appeal to get generators to Ukraine.
Millions of Ukrainians are facing blackouts as Russian forces bombard key infrastructure.
Ukrainians are currently without electricity as a result of Russia’s attacks on critical civilian targeted infrastructure,” Agence France-Presse reported Metsola saying.
Dario Nardella, the mayor of Florence, Italy, heads a network of local authorities in Europe and said he was looking to coordinate a group of 200 European cities to send generators they have in storage to Ukraine.
We’ve got the potential of sending several hundred, even industrial-sized, generators which will be able to produce quite a lot of power,” Nardella said.
It’s 9pm in Kyiv. Here’s where we stand:
Dozens of Russian missiles were launched against Ukraine on Wednesday morning, with explosions heard in Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions. Russian forces launched 70 missiles at Ukraine in its latest “large-scale attack on crucial infrastructure facilities,” Ukraine’s armed forces said. Air raid alerts were heard across all over the country.
The UN’s security council will hold an urgent meeting on Wednesday on Russia’s latest strikes at the request of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Zelenskiy said Ukrainians are “unbreakable” and that the country will rebuild damaged infrastructure and “get through all of this”.
At least seven people have been killed – including a 17-year-old girl – and 36 injured after a Russian missile strike in Kyiv, according to officials. Oleksii Kuleba, head of the regional military administration, said the entire Kyiv region was without electricity after Moscow’s airstrikes targeted critical infrastructure.
The mayor of Lviv, Andriy Sadovyi, has said the entire western Ukrainian city is “without light” after Russian strikes. Sadovyi warned that there would be “interruptions” with the city’s water supply and that he was awaiting additional information from energy experts.
Ukraine’s state-run nuclear energy firm, Energoatom, has said power units of three Ukrainian nuclear power plants were switched off after Russian missile strikes across the country. In a statement, it said “due to a decrease in frequency in the energy system of Ukraine” emergency protection was activated at the Rivne, Pivdennoukrainsk and Khmelnytskyi nuclear power plants.
Russian missile strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure caused blackouts across half of neighbouring Moldova, the deputy prime minister of Moldova said. Moldelectrica, the state-owned energy firm, is working to reconnect more than 50% of the country to electricity, Andrei Spînu, said. Moldova’s foreign affairs minister, Nicu Popescu, said he has asked for Russia’s ambassador to be summoned.
A newborn baby was killed after an overnight Russian rocket attack struck a hospital maternity ward in southern Ukraine. Ukraine’s state emergency service said that a woman with her two-day-old baby and a doctor had been in the facility in the town of Vilniansk, close to the city of Zaporizhzhia, that was destroyed.
The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, said warned the Ukrainian capital faces “the worst winter since World War II” after Russian attacks on the city’s energy infrastructure. Residents in Kyiv had to be ready for the “worst case scenario” of widespread power cuts at low temperatures in which parts of the capital would have to be evacuated, he said in an interview with the German newspaper Bild.
A Ukrainian security official has said suspected Russian citizens, cash and documents were seized in a raid on a 1,000-year-old Orthodox Christian monastery in Kyiv and other Orthodox sites. The raid, which took place on Tuesday, was part of operations to counter suspected “subversive activities by Russian special services”, Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of the national security and defence council, said.
The European parliament came under “sophisticated cyber-attacks” officials said, hours after it voted to declare Russia a state sponsor of terrorism. The president of the European parliament, Roberta Metsola, said a pro-Kremlin group has claimed responsibility for the denial of service attack on the European parliament’s website.
The European parliament has declared Russia “a terrorist regime” over its brutal war on Ukraine. In a non-binding resolution approved by a large majority of MEPs, the European parliament urged the EU’s 27 member states to make the same designation “with all the negative consequences this implies”. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, welcomed the declaration.
The US has announced a new $400m (£332.5m) aid package to Ukraine which will include weapons, munitions and air defence equipment. The package also includes more than 200 generators to help Ukraine deal with power outages caused by Russian attacks on energy infrastructure.
Germany has angrily dismissed claims by Boris Johnson that in the run-up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine it said it would be better for Ukraine to fold than to become embroiled in a long war. Johnson, interviewed by CNN, also claimed that the French president, Emmanuel Macron, was in denial about the threat of invasion, and that Italy, led at the time by Mario Draghi, said it could not help because it was so dependent on Russian hydrocarbons.
The head of the UN nuclear watchdog met a Russian delegation in Istanbul on Wednesday to discuss safety at the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, the watchdog said. The Zaporizhzhia plant, which Russia seized shortly after its invasion, was again rocked by shelling at the weekend, leading to renewed calls from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to create a protection zone around it to prevent a nuclear disaster.
The UK is sending helicopters to Ukraine for the first time, the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, has announced. Three Sea King helicopters will be provided, with the first already in Ukraine, according to PA Media. Wallace also said an extra 10,000 artillery rounds were being sent to help Ukraine secure the territory it has recaptured from the invading forces in recent weeks.
Russia has probably launched a number of Iranian manufactured uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) against Ukraine since September, Britain’s Ministry of Defence said. It’s also likely that Russia has nearly exhausted its current stock of Iran-made weapons and will seek resupply, the ministry said in its daily intelligence update.
A German government spokesperson, Steffen Hebestreit, rejected Boris Johnson’s claim that Berlin wanted Ukraine to fold and give in to Russia.
Hebestreit told reporters:
I’m tempted to switch to English and say it’s ‘utter nonsense’ what Boris Johnson said.
Taking a swipe at the former prime minister, he added that Johnson has his “own relationship with the truth”.
According to the Kyiv mayor, 21 of the 31 cruise missiles fired at the capital were intercepted. One of the 10 which evaded the defences hit an apartment block in Vyshgorod, a northern suburb of Kyiv, killing three people and wounding 15.
There was a kindergarten in the lower ground floor of the building, but it was evacuated just in time after the air raid sirens went off. The blast left a 3 metre crater just in front of the building, destroying the apartments around it, blowing the tops off nearby trees and leaving a children’s playground a charred wreck filled with debris.
“It flew right over us. We heard a whistling sound and then it came round down on the building,” Ruslan Vorona, a local resident, said. He and his eight-year-old son, Oleksii, were sheltering and charging their phones in an insulated tent set up by the emergency services.
“There were a few explosions. Two were quieter and one was louder, and one of the missiles went straight over my head,” a 28-year-old local man, Oleksandr, who would not give his last name, said.
Rescue workers were last night trying to salvage the remaining household possessions of the families left homeless by the blast, tying what they could find in sheets and throwing them to the ground from the four-storey brick building. There was not much left, but the emergency workers had made promises they would save what they could and they risked serious injury clambering through the wreckage to keep their word.
The death toll from today’s Russian strikes across Ukraine has risen to seven, according to officials.
Oleksii Kuleba, the head of Kyiv region military administration, said four people had died in the Kyiv region.
Mayor Vitali Klitschko said at least three people had died after the attack on the capital.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the head office of Ukraine’s president, said each new Russian attack “only strengthens our character”.
The Kremlin “still does not know a damn thing about Ukraine” if it believes that power outages caused by Russian strikes will make Ukrainians “overthrow government and beg for mercy”, Podolyak wrote on Twitter.
If Moscow really believes that power outage will make Ukrainians overthrow government and beg for mercy, then after 9 months of war Kremlin still does not know a damn thing about 🇺🇦. Each new attack only strengthens our character. RF feels it on a battlefield. We will add more…
— Михайло Подоляк (@Podolyak_M) November 23, 2022
The UN’s security council will hold an urgent meeting later today on Russia’s latest strikes across Ukraine at the request of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
A spokesperson for the US mission to the UN said the US, Albania and Ukraine requested the meeting to discuss “Russia’s massive missile strikes today damaging critical civilian infrastructure across Ukraine”.
The meeting is scheduled for 9pm UK time.
The US has announced a new $400m (£332.5m) aid package to Ukraine which will include weapons, munitions and air defence equipment.
In a statement, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said:
The artillery ammunition, precision fires, air defence missiles, and tactical vehicles that we are providing will best serve Ukraine on the battlefield.
The Pentagon said the package included additional munitions for Nasams air defence systems, high mobility artillery rocket systems (Himars), plus heavy machine guns with thermal imagery sights to counter Russian drones, and more than 20m rounds of small arms ammunition.
The package also includes more than 200 generators to help Ukraine deal with power outages caused by Russian attacks on energy infrastructure.
Pentagon press secretary, Brig Gen Pat Ryder, said the generators are “intended to support both civilian and military power needs … to ease the pressure on the grid”.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, thanked President Joe Biden for the new package and vowed his country “will not be scared by cowardly inhumane terrorist attacks of Russian war criminals”.
Ukraine will not be scared by cowardly inhumane terrorist attacks of Russian war criminals. Thank you @POTUS and 🇺🇸 people for standing with Ukraine and responding with a new PDA package which would allow us to save lives and continue our fight for Ukraine! Together we win!
— Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) November 23, 2022
Two months after mobilising tens of thousands of Russian men, the Kremlin has said that Vladimir Putin will grant some of their mothers and wives an audience to quell fears over the mass call-up.
But advocates for soldiers’ families have said they were passed over for the meeting and are expecting it to be a whitewash covering up the Kremlin’s disregard for its own soldiers fighting in Ukraine.
Valentina Melnikova, a veteran advocate for soldiers’ families going back to 1989, said in an interview with the Guardian that she had not been approached about the meeting with Putin, which is expected to take place later this week.
“Of course they didn’t invite us and we of course don’t want to go,” she said.
She said it would be one thing to go alone and meet the Russian president as representative of the Soldiers’ Mothers Committee, which she says has received thousands of complaints, more than in the years of the Russian war in Chechnya.
But she said that, like other rights activists who have not been chosen to take part in the meeting, she believed the Kremlin would handpick its representatives or perhaps even fill out their ranks with planted audience members, in order to stage Putin’s meeting with the “public”.
To go together with the relatives of mobilised [soldiers] who are agreed to their husbands and sons dying on the front is not comfortable for us. We have somewhat different interests and different problems.
The head of Ukraine’s football association, who served on Fifa’s disciplinary body until 2020, has been accused of fraud and money laundering related to the construction of an artificial grass factory.
Andriy Pavelko was served with papers by Ukraine’s national police on Tuesday, notifying him that he was suspected of abuse of power and conspiracy to misappropriate and launder funds.
When approached by the Guardian, Pavelko, who has been president of the Ukrainian FA (UAF) since 2015, denied any wrongdoing.
The UAF issued a statement in which it said that a previous national anti-corruption agency investigation had cleared Pavelko and other individuals. They accused pro-Russian forces of being behind the current investigation.
The statement said:
The real reason for the criminal pressure on the leadership of the UAF is the attempt of pro-Russian politicians to force the association to stop the fight against the Russian Federation, as well as to block the process of Ukraine’s preparation to participate in the role of organiser in the 2030 World Cup.
Pavelko, who has been president of the Ukrainian FA since 2015, was photographed with his face covered as he emerged from the public prosecutor’s office in Kyiv on Tuesday.
A leaked police document said Pavelko was suspected of “taking possession of someone else’s property by abuse of his official position as an official, committed on a particularly large scale by prior collusion by a group of persons”.