Heating has been fully restored to Kyiv, the city’s mayor has said, after one of the most intense Russian bombardments of the capital last week deprived it of major civilian energy supplies and forced the national government to implement blackouts.
Vitali Klitschko said on Sunday morning that the capital had managed to “restore all services after the last bombardment” and that “in particular, the capital’s heating supply system is fully restored”. All heat supply sources are operating normally.
Temperatures in Kyiv and across the country were below zero on Sunday and are expected to drop to -6C (21.2F) in the evening. Up to a third of the capital’s population of 3 million had been left without power overnight in what officials described as a “difficult and critical situation”.
A wave of Russian drone and missile attacks since October have caused severe damage to Ukraine’s civilian energy and electricity infrastructure as it enters the cold winter months. Russia fired more than 70 missiles targeting Ukraine’s water and energy infrastructure Friday in one of its heaviest dams since its invasion began on February 24, causing power outages and eliminating access to heating and water.
Four people in Russia’s southern border region of Belgorod were injured by shelling on Sunday, the governor said, and witnesses reported loud explosions in the regional capital. In Ukraineshelling was also reported in central Kherson, the main city from which Russian soldiers withdrew last month in one of the biggest setbacks to battlefield Moscow since its invasion.
Britain’s Ministry of Defense said in its intelligence assessment on Sunday that low morale remained a “significant vulnerability” for Russian forces, highlighting Moscow’s plans for a creative brigade to use “military music and organized entertainment” to boost morale.
The ministry in London said it doubted the new brigade could make up for ‘very high casualty rates, lack of leadership, pay issues, lack of equipment and ammunition and lack of clarity on objectives of the war”.
Moscow said Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visited troops involved in what he calls his special military operation in Ukraine after the Defense Ministry announced this week the formation of a “brigade creative frontline”, including singers and musicians, to boost morale.
RBC News in Russia quoted officials as saying the brigade would include conscripted and volunteer professional performers tasked with maintaining “a high moral, political and psychological state.” [among] participants in the special military operation”.
The ministry said Shoigu “flew over the troop deployment areas and checked the forward positions of Russian units in the special military operation area”, adding that he had spoken with frontline troops. It is not clear where.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Sunday proposed holding a world peace summit this winter, in a video message that Kyiv hoped to air ahead of the World Cup final in Qatar.
In an interview published on Sunday, veteran US diplomat Henry Kissinger said the time was approaching for a negotiated peace to reduce the risk of a devastating world war, but warned that dreams of Russia breaking up could trigger chaos nuclear.
Kissinger, 99, was secretary of state under Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and an architect of the Cold War policy of détente toward the former Soviet Union. He met Russian President Vladimir Putin several times.
“The time is approaching to build on the strategic changes that have already been made and integrate them into a new structure to achieve peace through negotiation,” Kissinger said. written in an article for Spectator magazine.
“A peace process should bind Ukraine to NATO, whatever form it takes. The alternative of neutrality no longer makes sense,” he wrote, adding that the desire to render Russia “impotent,” or even to seek its dissolution — which neither the West nor Ukraine no one advocated – could unleash chaos.
William Burns, the director of the CIA, said in an interview published on Saturday that while most conflicts end in negotiations, the agency’s assessment was that Russia was not yet serious about real negotiation. to end the war.
Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby said on Sunday Russia’s war on Ukraine had ‘opened the gates of hell’, unleashing ‘all evil forces’ in the world from murder and rape in territory occupied by famine and debt in Africa and Europe.
He said after a visit to Ukraine last month he was struck by “the size of the mass graves in Bucha, the pictures of what was done to people there, the rapes, the killings, the torture by the Russian occupying forces”. .
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