Russia-Ukraine war live: Zelenskiy expected to arrive in Washington in first trip outside Ukraine since start of war

Ukrainian president expected to meet with president Joe Biden and Congressional leaders

Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, will travel to Washington on Wednesday where he is expected to visit the White House and the US Capitol, according to several US media reports.

President Zelenskiy visited the frontline city of Bakhmut on Tuesday. He met military representatives and handed out awards to soldiers, his office has said.

A blast ripped through the Urengoi-Pomary-Uzhhorod gas exporting pipeline that leads from Russia through Ukraine. Reuters reported that three people died in the incident.

Ukraine was warned to prepare for new Russian attacks on its energy infrastructure. Prime minister Denys Shmyhal said Moscow wanted Ukraine to spend Christmas and new year in darkness.

Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, said the situation in four areas of eastern Ukraine – Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – that Moscow illegally annexed in September, was “extremely difficult”. Russia’s illegal annexation of the four territories, which together make up 15% of Ukraine, marked the largest forcible takeover of territory in Europe since the second world war and was condemned by Kyiv and its western allies as illegal. Russia has suffered acute setbacks in the areas, halting its ambitions.

The EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, on Tuesday condemned Iran’s support for Russia in its war in Ukraine and the ongoing repression of opposition in the country, but said the EU would continue to work with Iran on restoring the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. “Necessary meeting with Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian in Jordan amid deteriorating Iran-EU relations,” Borrell tweeted ahead of a regional conference being hosted by Jordan.

Ukraine is accelerating efforts to erase the vestiges of Soviet and Russian influence from its public spaces by pulling down monuments and renaming hundreds of streets to honour its own artists, poets, soldiers, independence leaders and others – including heroes of this year’s war. Since the war began, Ukraine’s leaders have shifted a campaign that once focused on dismantling its communist past into one of “de-Russification”.

China says Chinese-Russian naval drills beginning on Wednesday aim to “further deepen” cooperation between the two countries whose unofficial anti-western alliance has gained strength since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. The drills will be held off the coast of Zhejiang province south of Shanghai until next Tuesday, according to a brief notice posted Monday by China’s eastern theatre command under the ruling Communist party’s military wing, the People’s Liberation Army.