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Russian attacks hit Ukrainian-held city of Kostiantynivka to Bakhmut’s west, injuring eight people, as Zelenskiy adviser says Bakhmut defence to continue
Hello and welcome back to our live coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war. This is Adam Fulton bringing you up to speed.
Fighting in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut has “escalated”, with another push by Russian forces to break through Ukrainian defence lines that have largely held firm for the past six months.
Most of Kyiv’s power supply had been restored, Ukrainian officials said, after Russia’s latest missile and drone barrage targeting critical infrastructure on Thursday. Power supplies were fully restored in Ukraine’s southern Odesa region, private provider DTEK said, while about 60% of households in Kharkiv city that were knocked off grid were also back online, Associated Press quoted authorities as saying. Significant damage remained in the Zhytomyr and Kharkiv regions in Ukraine’s north-west and north-east.
Finland’s prime minister, Sanna Marin, made an unannounced visit to Kyiv and met President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday. They attended a service at St Michael’s Golden Dome cathedral in memory of Dmytro Kotsiubailo, a well-known Ukrainian military commander.
Thousands of people gathered in Kyiv to attend the funeral of Kotsiubailo. Nicknamed Da Vinci and hailed as a national hero and symbol of resistance, he was killed near Bakhmut on Tuesday, aged 27.
The underwater bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in September was carried out by a team of divers operating from a 15-metre chartered yacht called the Andromeda, according to a news report. The report in Der Spiegel traces the Andromeda’s route around the Baltic from its home marina in Rostock to the German island of Rügen and then to the Danish island of Christiansø, close to the site of the 26 September blasts. Questions have been raised about whether another vessel was involved.
The British prime minister has said the war in Ukraine will end at the negotiating table. Rishi Sunak said he would support Volodymyr Zelenskiy to be in the “best possible place to have those talks” and recommitted to providing Ukraine additional military support. Sunak’s comments marked a clear divide with his predecessor, Boris Johnson, in his stance on how the war against Russia will end.
Ukrainian officials have ordered a historically Russian-aligned wing of the Ukrainian Orthodox church to leave a monastery complex in Kyiv where it is based, the latest move against a denomination regarded with deep suspicion by the government.
The head of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group has thanked Moscow for a “heroic” increase in ammunition production but said he was still worried about shortages for his fighters and the Russian army as a whole. Yevgeny Prigozhin also said on Friday that Wagner had opened recruitment centres in 42 Russian cities.
The Kremlin said it saw risks of possible “provocations” in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two Russian-backed breakaway regions of Georgia, after days of protests in Georgia over a “foreign agents” bill. The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said Moscow was watching the situation “with concern”. The Kremlin regime sometimes issues false warnings about “provocations” for its own propaganda purposes.
The newly installed president of Cyprus, Nikos Christodoulides, denounced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, barely 10 days after he assumed power. In his first interview with a foreign TV channel, Christodoulides told Greek state broadcaster ERT that opposing Moscow’s self-styled “special military operation” put his island on the “right side of history”.
The International Fencing Federation has decided to allow Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete in Olympic qualifying events, sparking outrage in Ukraine. Fencing became the first Olympic sport to reopen events to the aggressor and its ally, one year after their exclusion due to the war in Ukraine.
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