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Russia denies reports naval infantry unit lost hundreds of men in eastern Ukraine
Russia’s defence ministry took the unusual step of denying reports by Russian military bloggers that a naval infantry unit had lost hundreds of men in a fruitless offensive in eastern Ukraine, the state-owned RIA news agency said.
It said the ministry had rejected the bloggers’ assertions that the 155th marine brigade of the Pacific Fleet had suffered “high, pointless losses in people and equipment”.
On the contrary, in the course of 10 days the unit had advanced 5km (more than three miles) into Ukrainian defensive positions south-west of Donetsk, RIA quoted the ministry as saying. It specifically denied that the brigade’s commanders had shown incompetence, Reuters reported.
“Due to the competent actions of the unit commanders, the losses of marines for the given period do not exceed 1% of combat strength, and 7% wounded, a significant part of whom have already returned to duty,” it said.
The rare denial suggested the reports had touched a raw nerve at a point in the war’s ninth month when Russian forces are under heavy pressure in partly occupied regions of Ukraine that Moscow has proclaimed as its own territory – actions denounced as illegal by Kyiv, the west and most countries of the United Nations.
Key events
Isobel Koshiw
The US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has reportedly held talks with aides to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, with the aim of reducing the risk that the war in Ukraine could spill over or escalate into a nuclear conflict.
The Wall Street Journal said the senior White House figure had held confidential conversations in recent months with the Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov and Russian security council secretary, Nikolai Patrushev, Sullivan’s counterpart, that were not made public.
Neither Washington or Moscow has confirmed if the talks took place and the report did not detail the time or dates of the phone calls.
The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, declined to comment on the report at his daily briefing. “Once again I repeat that there are some truthful reports, but for the most part there are reports that are pure speculation,” he told reporters.
Charlotte Higgins
At the National Opera of Ukraine in Kyiv recently, I watched a performance of an opera by the Ukrainian composer Mykola Lysenko. The work, charming and comic and an escape from the grimness of Russian missile attacks, is called Natalka Poltavka, based on a play by Ivan Kotliarevsky, who pioneered Ukrainian-language literature in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. Operas by Verdi, Puccini and Mozart, and ballets such as Giselle and La Sylphide, are on the playbill, despite the almost daily air raid sirens.
But there is no Eugene Onegin in sight, nor a Queen of Spades, and not a whisper of those Tchaikovsky staples of ballet, Sleeping Beauty or Swan Lake. Russian literature and music, Russian culture of all kinds, is off the menu in wartime Ukraine. It is almost a shock to return to the UK and hear Russian music blithely played on Radio 3.
This absence, some would say erasure, can be hard to comprehend outside Ukraine. When a symphony orchestra in Cardiff removed the 1812 Overture from a programme this spring, there was bafflement verging on an outcry: excising Tchaikovsky was allowing Vladimir Putin and his chums the satisfaction of “owning” Russian culture – it was censorship, it was playing into Russia’s hands. Tchaikovsky himself was not only long dead, but had been an outsider and an internationalist – so the various arguments went.
It took some careful explanation to convey that a piece of music glorifying Russian military achievements, and involving actual cannons, might be somewhere beyond poor taste when Russia was at that moment shelling Ukrainian cities – particularly when the families of orchestra members were directly affected.
Summary of the day so far …
Ukraine has accused Russia of looting empty homes in the southern city of Kherson and occupying them with troops in civilian clothes to prepare for street fighting in what both sides predict will be one of the war’s most important battles. In recent days, Russia has ordered civilians out of Kherson in anticipation of a Ukrainian assault to recapture the city, the only regional capital Moscow has seized since its invasion in February.
Ukraine’s Russian-occupied city of Kherson was cut off from water and electricity supplies on Sunday after an airstrike and damage to the Kakhovka dam, local officials said.
Ukraine’s military said Russia was urging residents of Kherson to evacuate as soon as possible, sending them warning messages on their phones on Sunday. Russia was “occupying and evacuating” Kherson simultaneously, trying to convince Ukrainians its force are leaving when in fact they are digging in, Nataliya Humenyuk, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s southern forces, told state television. The Kremlin-installed administration in Kherson already has expelled tens of thousands of civilians from the city.
Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vučić has said he expects the battle of Kherson to be the defining battle of the war. Russian state-owned news agency Tass quoted him saying: “We have a difficult time ahead of us, next winter will be even more difficult than this one, because we are facing the Battle of Stalingrad, the decisive battle in the war in Ukraine, the battle for Kherson, in which both sides use thousands of tanks, aircraft, artillery. The west thinks that in this way it will be able to destroy Russia, Russia believes that in this way it will be able to protect what it took at the beginning of the war and bring the war to an end. This will create additional problems everywhere.”
Russia’s defence ministry took the unusual step of denying reports by Russian military bloggers that a naval infantry unit had lost hundreds of men in a fruitless offensive in eastern Ukraine, the state-owned RIA news agency said. It said the ministry had rejected the bloggers’ assertions that the 155th marine brigade of the Pacific Fleet had suffered “high, pointless losses in people and equipment”.
Ukraine continues to brace for fresh Russian attacks on its energy infrastructure. Russia “is concentrating forces and means for a possible repetition of massive attacks on our infrastructure, primarily energy”, said Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the Ukrainian president.
Planned blackouts are scheduled to hit seven regions of Ukraine throughout Monday, according to Ukraine’s state-run energy company. The regions include the city of Kyiv, and the regions of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Cherkasy, Zhytomyr, Sumy, Kharkiv and Poltava.
Kyiv’s mayor urged residents to prepare for a worst-case scenario by making emergency plans to leave the city and stay with friends or family. Vitali Klitschko urged residents to “consider everything” including loss of power and water. “If you have extended family or friends outside Kyiv, where there is autonomous water supply, an oven, heating, please keep in mind the possibility of staying there for a certain amount of time.”
Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK, Vadym Prystaiko, echoed Klitschko’s words about evacuating Kyiv’s residents, saying “I hope it won’t come to this. If it comes to it, we’ll have to move them back to west west of Ukraine, Lviv and all the places closer to the European Union. That’s a huge number of people to be located but Ukrainian winters can become quite harsh. We have to think how we do it.”
Maksym Kozytskyi, governor of Lviv, one of Ukraine’s westernmost regions, has announced preparation measures for receiving more refugees and internally displaced people into his region, and appealed for help with the provision of diesel generators and financial aid for medical supplies.
Ukraine has received its first delivery of Nasams and Apside air defence systems, the country’s defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, announced Monday. “We will continue to shoot down the enemy targets attacking us. Thank you to our partners: Norway, Spain and the US,” Reznikov wrote on Twitter.
Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti reported Monday that President Vladimir Putin will make a decision on whether to attend the next G20 summit in person by the end of the week. Zelenskiy has said he will not attend if Putin does. The summit in Bali is due to begin Tuesday 15 November.
The head of Ukraine’s Byzantine-rite Catholic Church, Sviatoslav Shevchuk, met Pope Francis at the Vatican on Monday and said there can be no dialogue with Russia as long as Moscow considered the neighbour it invaded a colony to be subjugated. The Orthodox church of Ukraine has said worshippers can celebrate Christmas on 25 December, a move away from the traditional date of 7 January directed against pro-Putin head of Russian Orthodox church.
An internal rift over the supply of deadly drones to Russia for use in Ukraine has opened up in Iran, with a prominent conservative cleric and newspaper editor saying Russia is the clear aggressor in the war and the supply should stop. A former Iranian ambassador to Moscow has also hinted the foreign ministry may have been kept in the dark both by the Kremlin and the Iranian military.
Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK has told Sky News in London that the new British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, will visit the country soon. Sunak had promised that Ukraine would be his first overseas port of call if he became PM, but in a high-profile U-turn has headed to Egypt and Cop 27 instead. Prystaiko said:“We’re not going to discuss the dates, because of the security of your prime minister. But he’s coming to Ukraine quite soon.”
A senior adviser to Ukraine’s president has said Kyiv had never refused to negotiate with Moscow and that it was ready for talks with Russia’s future leader, but not with Vladimir Putin.
The comments on Twitter by Mykhailo Podolyak followed a Washington Post report on Saturday saying the Biden administration was privately encouraging Ukraine’s leaders to signal an openness to negotiate with Moscow.
“Ukraine has never refused to negotiate. Our negotiating position is known and open,” he wrote on Twitter, saying that Russia should first withdraw its troops from Ukraine.
“Is Putin ready? Obviously not. Therefore, we are constructive in our assessment: we will talk with the next leader of [Russia].”
Important: Ukraine has never refused to negotiate. Our negotiating position is known and open.
1. First, RF withdraws troops from 🇺🇦
2.After everything elseIs Putin ready? Obviously not. Therefore, we are constructive in our assessment: we will talk with the next leader of RF.
— Михайло Подоляк (@Podolyak_M) November 7, 2022
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has said 50,000 Russian soldiers called up as part of his mobilisation drive were now fighting with combat units in Ukraine, the Interfax news agency reported.
Putin said 80,000 were “in the zone of the special military operation” – the term Russia uses for its war in Ukraine – and the rest of the almost 320,000 draftees were at training camps in Russia.
“We now have 50,000 in their combat units. The rest are not taking part in the fighting yet,” Interfax quoted Putin as saying during a visit to the Tver region, outside Moscow.
In September, Putin announced a “partial mobilisation” drive to call up hundreds of thousands of new fighters for the war after Ukraine recaptured large swathes of territory in a counter-offensive.
The move triggered an exodus of hundreds of thousands of Russians and triggered anti-war protests across the country, Reuters reported.
Patrick Wintour
The Guardian’s diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour, reports:
An internal rift over the supply of deadly drones to Russia for use in Ukraine has opened up in Iran, with a prominent conservative cleric and newspaper editor saying Russia is the clear aggressor in the war and the supply should stop.
A former Iranian ambassador to Moscow has also hinted the foreign ministry may have been kept in the dark both by the Kremlin and the Iranian military.
Iran has denied for more than two months that it sold the drones to Russia despite their use to target power stations and civilian infrastructure, but at the weekend said it had supplied a small number of drones before the war started, an explanation that has been rejected by the US and Ukraine.
The row over the drones reflects a wider foreign policy debate in Tehran about the risks of developing close links with Moscow. It is also unusual, in that the criticism of Iran’s government is being led by a conservative cleric and a newspaper editor.
In remarks picked up by other Iranian newspapers, Masih Mohajeri, writing on the front page of the newspaper Jomhouri-e-Islami, highlighted three things the government should have done: advised the party that started the war, ie Russia, to observe international regulations that prohibit encroachment on the territory of other countries; told Russia at the outset of the war that it had no right to use the drones in Ukraine that Iran had provided; maintained stronger relations with the invaded country.
Read more of Patrick Wintour’s report here: Row brews in Iran over use of its drones in Ukraine war by Russia
It is the 105th anniversary of the October revolution in Russia – celebrated on 7 November because of calendar changes – and so at the Red Square in Moscow today Communist party and “Left Front” supporters have been carrying placards of Lenin and Stalin at a flower-laying ceremony at the Lenin mausoleum. The revolution led to civil war and ultimately the creation of the Soviet Union.
Maksym Kozytskyi, governor of Lviv, one of Ukraine’s westernmost regions, has announced preparation measures for receiving more refugees and internally displaced people into his region, and appealed for help with the provision of diesel generators and financial aid for medical supplies. In a message posted to Telegram, he said:
Lviv oblast is among the five regions that received the largest number of forced migrants. Taking into account the fact that the occupier is targeting energy facilities, we expect a new wave of internally displaced people – from those regions where they will not be able to start the heating season.
Therefore we are renovating dormitories in which no one has lived for a long time. They will serve as shelters for people who lost their homes due to Russia’s military actions. Funds from the regional budget are directed to repairs.
Another important need of the Lviv region now is diesel generators. We want to provide them as much as possible for all important objects of the Lviv region, in particular medical and educational institutions, institutions where the elderly and disabled, and children without parents from among forced migrants are staying.
Also, financial support is needed by medical institutions of our region, which have an increased need for medical supplies and equipment.
The head of Ukraine’s Byzantine-rite Catholic Church met Pope Francis at the Vatican on Monday and said there can be no dialogue with Russia as long as Moscow considered the neighbour it invaded a colony to be subjugated.
Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk’s trip to visit the pontiff was his first trip outside Ukraine since the Russian invasion in February. He said he prefers to remain in Kyiv to be close to the people despite the bombings and hardships.
“The war in Ukraine is a colonial war and peace proposals by Russia are proposals of colonial pacification,” he said after meeting the pope at the Vatican.
Reuters reports that Shevchuk, who has several times urged the pope to visit Kyiv, gave Francis a piece of shrapnel from a Russian mine that destroyed the facade of a church in Irpin in March.
“These proposals imply the negation of the existence of the Ukrainian people, their history, culture and even their church. It is the negation of the very right of the Ukrainian state to exist with the sovereignty and territorial integrity that is recognised by the international community,” Shevchuk said.
“With these premises, Russia’s proposals lack a basis for dialogue,” he said.
Earlier today, we reported that the Orthodox church of Ukraine allows worshippers to celebrate Christmas on 25 December, in a move that distances it from traditionally observing Christmas on 7 January, at the same time as the Moscow patriarchy, which has blessed Putin’s war.
Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox church, is a prominent supporter of Vladimir Putin and has said Russian soldiers who are killed will be cleansed of all their sins.
You can read more about that from Luke Harding and Artem Mazhulin in Kyiv here: Orthodox church of Ukraine allows worshippers to celebrate Christmas on 25 December
Ukraine claims Russia occupying empty Kherson homes with troops in civilian clothes
Ukraine has accused Russia of looting empty homes in the southern city of Kherson and occupying them with troops in civilian clothes to prepare for street fighting in what both sides predict will be one of the war’s most important battles.
In recent days, Russia has ordered civilians out of Kherson in anticipation of a Ukrainian assault to recapture the city, the only regional capital Moscow has seized since its invasion in February, Reuters reported.
Kherson, with a pre-war population of nearly 300,000, has been left cold and dark after power and water were cut to the surrounding area over the past 48 hours, both sides said.
Russian-installed officials blamed Ukrainian “sabotage” and said they were working to restore electricity. Ukrainian officials said the Russians had dismantled 1.5km of power lines, and electricity probably would not return until Ukrainian forces recapture the area.
Kyiv has described the evacuation of the area as a forced deportation, a war crime. Moscow says it is sending residents away for safety.
Three top Ukrainian officials confirmed that the shares of five strategic companies had been taken over by the defence ministry under wartime laws.
The decision was taken at a top security meeting on 5 November and came into force the following day, security council secretary Oleksiy Danilov told a briefing today.
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