Russia-Ukraine latest: Deaths, blackouts as cities are pounded

Zelenskyy has appealed to the United Nations Security Council to take action to stop Russian air attacks hitting vital infrastructure, which have once again plunged Ukrainian cities into darkness and cold as winter sets in.

Russia unleashed a missile barrage across Ukraine earlier in the day, forcing shutdowns of nuclear power plants and killing civilians in Kyiv.

“Today is just one day but we have received 70 missiles. That’s the Russian formula of terror,” Zelenskyy said via video link to the council chamber in New York, adding that hospitals, schools, transport infrastructure and residential areas had all been hit.

Ukraine is waiting to see “a very firm reaction” to Wednesday’s air attacks from the world, he added.

The council is unlikely to take any action in response to the appeal since Russia is a member with veto power.

Zelenskyy called for Russia to be denied a vote on any decision concerning its actions.

“We cannot be hostage to one international terrorist,” he said. “Russia is doing everything to make an energy generator a more powerful tool than the UN Charter.”

Ukraine’s state-run nuclear energy firm, Energoatom, has said the power units of three Ukrainian nuclear power plants were switched off after Russian missile strikes across the country.

In a statement, Energoatom 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.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Ukrainians are “unbreakable” after Russian attacks across the country.

Ukraine will rebuild infrastructure damaged by today’s attacks and “get through all of this”, he said in a video address posted to Telegram.

“Today, the European Parliament recognised Russia as a terrorist state …  And then Russia proved that all this is true by using 67 missiles against our infrastructure, our energy grid, and ordinary people,” Zelenskyy said.

UN political affairs chief Rosemary DiCarlo has told the Security Council an exchange of Russian and 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.

Earlier, Andriy Yermak, the head of the Ukrainian presidential office, shared an image of 36 of his country’s servicemen who have returned after being held captive in Russia.

Fighters at the Azovstal steelworks in the southern port city of Mariupol were among those returned, he added.

Returned 36 our citizens from the Russian captivity, one civilian and 35 military personnel.
Among them are Mariupol and "Azovstal" defenders, as well as national guards captured at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in early days of the invasion. pic.twitter.com/q8eX5NCICz

— Andriy Yermak (@AndriyYermak) November 23, 2022

A Russian court has extended by six months the detention of opposition politician Ilya Yashin, who risks being jailed for 10 years for denouncing Russia’s war in 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.

Yashin refused to leave the country after Putin sent troops to Ukraine on February 24 and regularly took to his YouTube channel, which has 1.3 million subscribers, to condemn his country’s offensive.

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.

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,” AFP reports.

The Kremlin has expressed faith in the “success” of its offensive in Ukraine as Russian attacks left the ex-Soviet country’s energy system in tatters.

“The future and the success of the special operation are beyond doubt,” Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said during a visit to Armenia, using Moscow’s official term to describe its war.

Peskov, who accompanied President Vladimir Putin to the Armenian capital Yerevan, did not provide further details.

France and Spain have 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.

The EU executive on Tuesday unveiled a gas “safety ceiling” of 275 euros (about $286) 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 (Title Transfer Facility).

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 (about $60) for 10 days within that same two-week period.

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 cap, if adopted, would come into force in January and came after months of wrangling between EU countries.

It runs alongside a plan by member states to voluntarily cut natural gas use by 15 percent over the Northern Hemisphere winter.

Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station has once again been cut off from its external power supply and is relying on emergency diesel generators, the International Atomic Energy Agency said on Wednesday.

“The latest incident … highlights the increasingly precarious and challenging nuclear safety and security situation,” the IAEA said in a statement.

The plant, Europe’s largest, has frequently lost access to external electricity amid shelling that Russia and Ukraine blame on each other.

The Zaporizhzhia plant, which Russia seized shortly after its invasion, was again rocked by shelling at the weekend, leading to renewed calls from the IAEA to create a protection zone around it to prevent a nuclear disaster.

Europe’s biggest cities will donate power generators and transformers to help Ukrainians get through the harsh winter ahead as part of a drive launched on Wednesday.

Since October, Russia has been targeting Ukraine’s power and heating systems with long-range missiles and drones. Moscow says the aim is to reduce Kyiv’s ability to fight and push it to negotiate.

“Ten million Ukrainians are currently without electricity as a result of Russia’s attacks on critical civilian infrastructure,” European Parliament President Roberta Metsola said at a news conference on the “Generators of Hope” campaign.

The European Union’s assembly launched the campaign with Eurocities, a network of more than 200 cities in 38 countries.

The cities will be urged to provide generators to keep the power on at essential facilities in Ukraine, including hospitals, schools, water supply facilities, relief centres, shelters and mobile phone masts.

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 push Ukrainians to “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

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has thanked President Joe Biden for the latest aid package and pledged that his country “will not be scared by cowardly inhumane terrorist attacks of Russian war criminals”.

The US announced a new $400m aid package to Ukraine, which will include weapons, munitions and air defence equipment.

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 20 million 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, Brigadier General Pat Ryder, said the generators are “intended to support both civilian and military power needs … to ease the pressure on the grid”.

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

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.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said at least three people had died following the attack on the capital.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is expected to brief the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday about the damage to his country’s civilian infrastructure from Russian missile strikes.

A spokesperson for the United States mission to the United Nations said the US, Albania and Ukraine requested the previously unscheduled meeting on Wednesday to discuss “Russia’s massive missile strikes today damaging critical civilian infrastructure across Ukraine”.

Russia unleashed a missile barrage across Ukraine earlier in the day, forcing shutdowns of nuclear power plants and killing civilians in Kyiv.

A diplomat from a Security Council member nation, who requested anonymity, said that Zelenskyy would address the council, Reuters reported.

Dmitry Polyanskiy, head of Russia’s permanent UN mission, also said Zelenskyy had been announced as a speaker at the meeting via video link, which he called a violation of the council’s procedural rules.

“Today the Ukrainians, frightened by our attacks on infrastructure, requested an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council,” Polyanskiy wrote on Telegram.

The International Rescue Committee has condemned an overnight Russian rocket attack that struck a hospital maternity ward in southern Ukraine, killing a newborn baby.

In a statement, the IRC’s vice president for emergencies, Bob Kitchen, said the attack on the town of Vilniansk, close to the city of Zaporizhzhia, was part of a “dangerous global trend of increasing attacks on health in conflict”.

“No child should be born under a barrage of missile strikes. No child should die buried in rubble remaining from hospitals, where their mothers seek safety and protection,” he said in a statement.

Ukrainian defence forces have shot down 51 of the 67 Russian cruise missiles that were launched on Wednesday, the country’s top general said, after strikes that knocked out power-generating facilities.

Commander-in-chief Valeriy Zaluzhny, writing on Telegram, said 30 missiles had been launched at Kyiv alone, adding that 20 were downed.

The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, has warned that the Ukrainian capital faces “the worst winter since World War II”, after a barrage of Russian attacks on energy infrastructure left many parts of the city in the dark.

Residents in Kyiv have to be ready for the “worst case scenario” of widespread power cuts at low temperatures, he said in an interview with the German newspaper Bild.

Parts of the capital would have to be evacuated in this scenario, he said.

Millions of people in Ukraine face a life-threatening winter this year, the World Health Organization warned on Monday, as Russia continues to pound the country’s energy infrastructure while temperatures plummet.

The head of the National Police of Ukraine, Ihor Klymenko, has said six people were killed and 36 wounded following a new wave of Russian attacks across Ukraine.

The actual number of casualties is expected to be higher, he added.

⚡️Russia's bombardment of Ukraine kills 6, injures 36.

National Police Chief Ihor Klymenko said that Russia's Nov. 23 bombardment of Ukraine killed six people and injured 36.

He added that the actual number of casualties is expected to be higher.

— The Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent) November 23, 2022

Russian missile and rocket bombardments on Ukrainian infrastructure has knocked out power across large areas of the war-torn country and parts of neighbouring Moldova.

In Kyiv, where the water supply was also cut off, at least four civilians were killed and nine wounded when a rocket hit a two-storey building on Wednesday, authorities said.

Multiple regions reported attacks on critical infrastructure in quick succession as Moscow pursues its campaign to debilitate Ukraine’s essential services ahead of winter.

Read more here.

Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said at a summit in Yerevan of the six-member Collective Security Treaty Organisation that it was time for a “collective” search for peace in Ukraine, Russia’s state-owned TASS news agency reported.

The United States authorises an additional $400m in military aid to Ukraine, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced.

In a statement, Bliken said, “This $400 million drawdown includes additional arms, munitions, and air defence equipment from US Department of Defense inventories.

“This drawdown will bring the total US military assistance for Ukraine to an unprecedented level of approximately $19.7 billion since the beginning of the Administration.”

President Joe Biden has said he expects US aid to Ukraine will continue without interruption despite Republicans holding a new majority in the House of Representatives.

The Biden administration has so far provided $19.7bn in military assistance to Ukraine as it fights a war begun when Russia invaded nine months ago.

“We will continue to support Ukraine for as long as it takes, so it can continue to defend itself and be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table when the time comes. We stand United with Ukraine,” Blinken said.