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Russia-Ukraine war live: Berlin announces new £1.1bn military aid package; Russia likely building cruise missile supplies, UK says
Berlin announces new military aid package for Ukraine worth £1.1bn
Germany will support Ukraine with another military aid package worth €1.3bn (£1.1bn) that will include an additional IRIS-T air defence unit, the country’s defence minister, Boris Pistorius, has said in Kyiv, Reuters reports.
The German government has pitched itself to be the “backbone” of European defence since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and pledged to support Kyiv while also bringing its military spending up to the Nato target of 2% of GDP.
Berlin is the second-biggest supplier of military assistance to Kyiv after the US. The chancellor, Olaf Scholz, pledged last month that Germany would maintain its aid to Kyiv, insisting that “we will support Ukraine as long as necessary”.
Key events
Ukraine’s defence minister, Rustem Umerov, has said no decision had been taken to dismiss two senior military commanders, according to Reuters.
Umerov made the comment at a joint news conference alongside his German counterpart, Boris Pistorius.
He was being asked about reports that joint forces commander Serhiy Nayev and Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, chief of Ukraine’s “Tavria” military command, could be fired.
“I must say that the decision has not yet been made, but we are doing everything possible to improve efficiency,” he told reporters.
Berlin announces new military aid package for Ukraine worth £1.1bn
Germany will support Ukraine with another military aid package worth €1.3bn (£1.1bn) that will include an additional IRIS-T air defence unit, the country’s defence minister, Boris Pistorius, has said in Kyiv, Reuters reports.
The German government has pitched itself to be the “backbone” of European defence since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and pledged to support Kyiv while also bringing its military spending up to the Nato target of 2% of GDP.
Berlin is the second-biggest supplier of military assistance to Kyiv after the US. The chancellor, Olaf Scholz, pledged last month that Germany would maintain its aid to Kyiv, insisting that “we will support Ukraine as long as necessary”.
Russia said on Tuesday it was holding joint naval exercises with India in the Bay of Bengal, as the two countries bolster security ties despite Moscow’s war in Ukraine, AFP reports.
The US has in the past voiced concern about India holding joint drills with Russia, which has been trying to expand its influence in the region.
“The purpose of the exercise is to comprehensively develop and strengthen naval cooperation between Russia and India,” Moscow’s defence ministry said.
The drills will help the two navies “jointly counter global threats and ensure the safety of civilian shipping in the Asia-Pacific region”, Moscow added.
Here are some of the latest images from the newswires:
Slovakia’s new government, led by the populist prime minister, Robert Fico, who ended the country’s military aid for Ukraine, has won a mandatory confidence vote in parliament, the Associated Press reports.
Of the 143 politicians present in the 150-seat parliament, 78 voted in favour of the three-party coalition government that was sworn in on 25 October.
Fico returned to power and took over as prime minister for the fourth time after his scandal-tainted leftist Smer, or Direction, party won Slovakia’s 30 September parliamentary election on a pro-Russian and anti-US platform.
Fico formed a parliamentary majority by signing a coalition government deal with the leftist Hlas, or Voice, party and the ultranationalist Slovak National party.
Slovakia, a country of 5.5 million people that shares a border with Ukraine, had been a staunch supporter of Kyiv since Russia’s full-scale invasion, donating arms and opening its borders for refugees fleeing the war.
Fico has stopped the military aid. He also opposes EU sanctions on Russia and wants to block Ukraine from joining Nato.
Russia likely building up stockpile of cruise missiles ahead of winter, says UK’s MoD
Russia has not used its “premier air launched cruise missiles” from its heavy bomber fleet for nearly two months, likely allowing it to build up a substantial stock of these weapons, the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) has said in its latest intelligence update.
Moscow is likely to use these missiles if it repeats last year’s campaign to destroy Ukraine’s critical national infrastructure, the MoD wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
The MoD also said Russia launched about 50 Iranian-designed Shahed drones over the weekend, primarily towards Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital.
This was on two axes: from Kursk to the east, and from Krasnodar to the south-east, according to the ministry.
Writing on X, the MoD said of the reported drone attacks:
One of Russia’s objectives was likely to degrade Ukraine’s air defences, to shape the battlespace ahead of any concerted winter campaign of strikes against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.
The European Council president, Charles Michel, said ahead of his arrival in Kyiv that he was coming to “express the strong support of the EU” and prepare with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, for an upcoming EU summit in December, AFP reports.
The European Commission, the EU’s executive, in early November recommended opening formal membership talks with Ukraine.
Russia’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, has said that Ukraine had failed to carry out a landing operation in the Kherson region, the Interfax news agency reported.
Shoigu’s ministry said marines, aviation and artillery had scuppered further Ukrainian attempts to gain a foothold on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River and on islands at the mouth of the river in southern Ukraine.
Kherson region is one of four Ukrainian regions that Russia claims to have annexed since it sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine last February.
Morning summary
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The German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, has arrived in Kyiv for an unannounced visit, Agence France-Presse is reporting. He arrived by train and will hold talks with his Ukrainian counterpart as well as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
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Two people were killed and six wounded in overnight Russian missile attacks and shelling in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk and Kharkiv regions, Ukrainian officials said on Tuesday. Missiles hit a hospital in the Donetsk town of Selydove and a coalmine, the interior minister, Ihor Klymenko, said on the Telegram messaging service.
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Ukraine sacked two senior cyber-defence officials, a government official said, as prosecutors announced an investigation into alleged embezzlement in the government’s cybersecurity agency. Yurii Shchyhol, the head of the state service of special communications and information protection of Ukraine (SSSCIP), and his deputy, Viktor Zhora, were dismissed by the government, senior cabinet official Taras Melnychuk wrote on Telegram.
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Ukrainian forces were engaged in containing increasing Russian attacks on Monday around the shattered eastern town of Bakhmut, which was seized by Moscow in May, military officials said. Volodymyr Fityo, a spokesperson for Ukrainian ground forces, said Russian troops focused attacks on Klishchiivka, a nearby village on heights retaken by Ukrainian forces in September.
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Russia barred entry to a number of officials from Moldova on Monday and complained about moves by its pro-European government to block Russian media outlets ahead of local elections earlier this month. The moves were the latest in a series of acerbic exchanges between the two sides and allegations by Moldova that Russia has been exerting pressure on the ex-Soviet state’s affairs and President Maia Sandu’s drive to join the EU.
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Zelenskiy met the Fox Corp CEO, Lachlan Murdoch, in the Ukrainian capital in what Kyiv said on Monday was a “very important signal” of support at a time when global media attention has shifted from the war in Ukraine. Media titan Rupert Murdoch’s eldest son is a leading figure in media with a US Republican-leaning audience. His visit comes as concern in Ukraine mounts over the future of vital American military and economic aid with the war with Russia showing no end in sight.
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Russia has placed a Ukrainian singer who won the 2016 Eurovision song contest on its wanted list, state news agencies reported on Monday. The reports said an interior ministry database listed the singer Susana Jamaladinova, known as Jamala, as being sought for violating a law adopted last year that bans spreading so-called fake information about the Russian military and the fighting in Ukraine.
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Two people were killed early on Monday after Russian forces shelled a parking lot in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, authorities said. Regional prosecutors opened a war crimes investigation into the artillery strike, which injured one other person, the regional prosecutor’s office said.
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An elderly woman was also killed and a man injured in a Russian artillery strike on the town of Nikopol, in the central region of Dnipropetrovsk, the regional governor said. “A power line and a gas pipeline were damaged,” Serhiy Lysak said on Telegram.
Russia cannot coexist with the current “regime” in Kyiv but Moscow can resist the might of Nato for as long as it needs to fully demilitarise Ukraine, a senior Russian diplomat said on Tuesday, Reuters reports.
“The current regime [in Kyiv] is absolutely toxic, we do not see any options for coexistence with it at the moment,” Russian ambassador-at-large Rodion Miroshnik told reporters in Moscow.
His post was created to collect evidence about alleged Ukrainian crimes against civilians.
Miroshnik said Ukraine had carried out crimes against civilians and had breached human rights while Nato had supplied forbidden weapons to Ukraine. Ukraine and the West accuse Russia of war crimes in Ukraine, a charge that Moscow denies.
Miroshnik said Russia could resist the US-led Nato military alliance as long as was needed to defeat Ukrainian forces in what Moscow calls a “special military operation” (SMO), adding that the west would eventually lose interest and the current authorities in Kyiv would collapse.
“As soon as the danger is liquidated, this can be considered to be the achievement of the SMO’s goals,” Miroshnik said. “We can resist Nato just as much as we need to fulfil the tasks that the president has formulated.”
Luke Harding
Nadya Tolokonnikova, the founder of Pussy Riot who spent two years in Russian jail as a political prisoner, has written for the Guardian about her friend Sasha Skochilenko. A court in St Petersburg sentenced Skochilenko last week to seven years in prison for protesting against Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Tolokonnikova writes: “Despite the fact that I am in a cell, it is possible that I am much more free than all of you.” These were the defiant words of the 33-year-old Russian artist Aleksandra “Sasha” Skochilenko in the closing statement of her trial in St Petersburg last Thursday.
Two hours later the judge sentenced her to seven years in a penal colony. The charge was knowingly spreading false information about the Russian army, all for five pieces of paper with facts about the cost of the war in Ukraine, which she subversively placed in ordinary places for ordinary Russians to see – on products in supermarkets.”
In her final statement to the court, translated by Max Lawton, Skochilenko described the criminal case against her as “strange and funny”.
“Yes, I am a pacifist. Pacifists have always existed. They are a special sort of people who believe that life is the highest of all possible values. Pacifists believe that any conflict, even the most beastly, can be resolved by way of peace. I am afraid of killing even a spider, it terrifies me to imagine that it is possible to take someone else’s life. This is how I grew up, how my mom raised me.”
She added: “Despite the fact that I am in a cell, it is possible that I am much more free than all of you. I can do what I want, I can say what I want, I can quit my job if I am being forced to do that which I don’t wish to do, I can organise my free schedule of work and rest, spend as much time with my beloved and dear ones as I wish. I can dress how I want to. I can love whom I want to.
“I have no enemies. I’m not afraid to remain poor, not afraid of losing the roof over my head. I’m not afraid of seeming strange, vulnerable, weak, or funny. I’m not afraid to be unlike other people. It is possible that this is precisely why my government is so afraid of me and those who are like me – after all, it keeps me in a cage like the most dangerous of beasts.”
The European Council president, Charles Michel, arrived in Kyiv on Tuesday in a gesture of support as Ukraine marks 10 years since the start of mass protests that toppled a Moscow-backed president, Reuters reports.
“Good to be back in Kyiv among friends,” said Michel on social media platform X, posting a picture of himself shaking hands with the EU’s ambassador to Ukraine, Katarína Mathernová, at Kyiv’s railway station.
Reuters reports that Russia is waiting for the outcome of an investigation into the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines before making any request for compensation, the RIA state news agency cited a foreign ministry official as saying on Tuesday.
The pipelines under the Baltic Sea were damaged in explosions last year, and investigations have yet to establish who was responsible.
In reply to a question about compensation, RIA quoted Dmitry Birichevsky, the head of the ministry’s economic cooperation department, as saying: “The probe is not over yet, we are waiting for its results to be presented to the [UN] security council, then we will decide what to do.”
Russia has blamed the US, Britain and Ukraine for the blasts that largely cut it off from the lucrative European market. Those countries have denied involvement.
The UN security council has refused to carry out its own investigation into the incident, leaving it to the governments of Sweden, Denmark and Germany.
Russia said on Tuesday that marines, aviation and artillery had scuppered more Ukrainian attempts to gain a foothold on the eastern bank of the River Dnipro and on islands at the mouth of the river in southern Ukraine, Reuters reports.
Ukraine said this month that its forces had crossed the Dnipro and established several bridgeheads on the eastern banks of the river, though Russia said it was pummelling the Ukrainian positions.
“Black Sea fleet marines are stopping all attempts by the armed forces of Ukraine to carry out amphibious landings on the Dnipro islands and the left bank of the Dnipro River,” Russia’s defence ministry said.
The Russian defence ministry published a video which it said showed marines from the 810th Guards Naval Infantry Brigade defeating Ukrainian forces. Soldiers were shown firing a variety of weapons, though the result of the fighting was unclear.
It said Ukrainian forces were suffering heavy casualties and losing equipment in unsuccessful attempts to land on islands in the Dnipro. Reuters was unable to immediately verify battlefield accounts from either side.
It is still unclear how significant the Ukrainian attempt to gain a foothold on the eastern bank of the Dnipro is. Crossing the Dnipro leaves Ukrainian units exposed between river and marshland on one side and heavily fortified Russian lines on the other.
According to unverified reports by pro-Russian bloggers, Russia has been harrying Ukrainian forces near the village of Krynky, near marshes on the eastern bank upriver from Kherson, from which Russia withdrew its forces in autumn 2022.
The US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, has announced the Pentagon will be sending an additional $100m in weapons to Ukraine from existing US stockpiles, including artillery and munitions for air defence systems. He made the announcement in a surprise visit to Kyiv – a day before a visit by the German defence minister.
Austin’s visit to Kyiv was a high-profile push to keep money and weapons flowing to Ukraine. After travelling to Kyiv by train from Poland, Austin met President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the defence minister, Rustem Umerov, and the chief of staff, Gen Valerii Zaluzhnyi.
The package includes another High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or Himars. Austin said Ukraine’s effort to defeat Russian forces “matters to the rest of the world” and that US support would continue “for the long haul”.
Reuters reports that Ukraine air defences shot down one missile and nine out of 10 drones in a Russian overnight strike, the country’s air force said on Tuesday.
The air force said in a statement the Russian forces launched Iranian-made drones from Russian territory on several directions.
Two killed by Russian shelling, Ukrainian officials say
Reuters reports that two people were killed and six were wounded in overnight Russian missile attacks and shelling in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk and Kharkiv regions, Ukrainian officials said on Tuesday.
Missiles hit a hospital in the Donetsk town of Selydove and a coalmine, the interior minister, Ihor Klymenko, said on the Telegram messaging service.
“Two buildings of the hospital were damaged, six civilians were injured. There may be victims under the rubble, search operations continue,” Klymenko said.
One worker was killed in the attack on the coalmine, he said.
“Four buildings, 19 vehicles and a power line were damaged. 39 miners were trapped underground. As of now, all miners have been brought to the surface,” he said.
Invading Russian forces have occupied much of Donetsk and Russia has said it intends to take over the whole region.
In Kharkiv, one person was killed in Russian shelling, the region’s governor, Oleh Synehubov, said.
Neither Reuters or the Guardian was not able to verify the reports.
Germany’s defence chief has arrived in Ukraine on a surprise visit.
Boris Pistorius arrived in Kyiv on Tuesday by train, , according to the AFP news agency. It’s understood he is seeking to offer reassurances on Germany’s support for Ukraine in its war against Russia.
The German defence minister is due to hold talks with his Ukrainian counterpart as well as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. This is his second visit to the capital since he took on the role.
It’s a visit that comes after an increase in Russian air attacks on Ukraine and as Kyiv braces for an expected rise in strikes on the country’s energy facilities over the coming winter months.
It is Pistorius’s second visit to Kyiv since he became defence minister at the start of this year and it comes a day after the US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, made an unannounced trip to Ukraine.
Berlin is the second-biggest supplier of military assistance to Kyiv after the US. The chancellor, Olaf Scholz, pledged last month that Germany would maintain its aid to Kyiv, insisting that “we will support Ukraine as long as necessary”.
Welcome and summary
Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine.
The German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, has arrived in Kyiv for an unannounced visit, Agence France-Presse is reporting. He arrived by train and will hold talks with his Ukrainian counterpart as well as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Berlin is the second-biggest supplier of military assistance to Kyiv after the US and is seeking to offer reassurances after the shift in focus to the Middle East war prompted concerns about waning support for Ukraine.
More on this shortly. In the meantime, here are the other key recent developments:
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Ukraine sacked two senior cyber-defence officials, a government official said, as prosecutors announced an investigation into alleged embezzlement in the government’s cybersecurity agency. Yurii Shchyhol, the head of the state service of special communications and information protection of Ukraine (SSSCIP), and his deputy, Viktor Zhora, were dismissed by the government, senior cabinet official Taras Melnychuk wrote on Telegram.
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Ukrainian forces were engaged in containing increasing Russian attacks on Monday around the shattered eastern town of Bakhmut, which was seized by Moscow in May, military officials said. Volodymyr Fityo, a spokesperson for Ukrainian ground forces, said Russian troops focused attacks on Klishchiivka, a nearby village on heights retaken by Ukrainian forces in September.
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Russia barred entry to a number of officials from Moldova on Monday and complained about moves by its pro-European government to block Russian media outlets ahead of local elections earlier this month. The moves were the latest in a series of acerbic exchanges between the two sides and allegations by Moldova that Russia has been exerting pressure on the ex-Soviet state’s affairs and President Maia Sandu’s drive to join the European Union.
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Zelenskiy met the Fox Corp CEO, Lachlan Murdoch, in the Ukrainian capital in what Kyiv said on Monday was a “very important signal” of support at a time when global media attention has shifted from the war in Ukraine. Media titan Rupert Murdoch’s eldest son is a leading figure in media with a US Republican-leaning audience. His visit comes as concern in Ukraine mounts over the future of vital American military and economic aid with the war with Russia showing no end in sight.
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Russia has placed a Ukrainian singer who won the 2016 Eurovision Song Contest on its wanted list, state news agencies reported on Monday. The reports said an interior ministry database listed the singer Susana Jamaladinova, known as Jamala, as being sought for violating a law adopted last year that bans spreading so-called fake information about the Russian military and the fighting in Ukraine.
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Two people were killed early on Monday after Russian forces shelled a parking lot in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, authorities said. Regional prosecutors opened a war crimes investigation into the artillery strike, which injured one other person, the regional prosecutor’s office said.
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An elderly woman was also killed and a man injured in Russian artillery strike on the town of Nikopol, in the central region of Dnipropetrovsk, the regional governor said. “A power line and a gas pipeline were damaged,” Serhiy Lysak said on Telegram.
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