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Ukraine takes back 500 square km of territory in a week, Zelenskiy says
Ukraine’s proclaimed wins in the southern region of Kherson are the latest in a series of Russian defeats undermining the Kremlin’s claim to have annexed around 20% of Ukraine.
“More than (500 square kilometres) have been liberated from Russian occupiers in the Kherson region alone” since the start of October, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced late Thursday in his nightly address.
The recaptured territory was home to dozens of towns and villages that had been occupied by Russian forces for months, southern army command spokeswoman Natalia Gumeniuk said.
Kherson, a region with an estimated pre-war population of around one million people, was captured early and easily by Moscow’s troops after their invasion launched on 24 February.
Key events
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, has said this morning that Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s comments about Nato making “preventive strikes” showed that Russia had needed to carry out what it terms its “special military operation” within Ukraine’s borders.
Yesterday, speaking via video link to an audience in Australia, Ukraine’s president had said “What should Nato do? Make it impossible for Russia to use nuclear weapons. What is important, I once again appeal to the international community … preventive strikes so that they know what will happen to them if they use them [nuclear weapons].”
Today marks Russian President Vladimir Putin’s birthday, an event that has not gone unnoticed by Arvydas Anušauskas, Lithuania’s defence minister. He has sarcastically tweeted, in a reference to photographs of Putin meeting world leaders at a distance, that the Russian president has been gifted “a new table and binoculars”, and said that in his honour “Lithuanian people are raising money for some ‘fireworks’”.
Today Putin on the occasion of his birthday was given a new table and binoculars for communicating with visitors. Lithuanian people are raising money for some “fireworks”.
— Arvydas Anušauskas (@a_anusauskas) October 7, 2022
Oleh Synyehubov, governor of Kharkiv, has posted to Telegram to say that in the last 24 hours, eight people have been hospitalised in the region as a result of Russian shelling. He also said that a 47-year-old woman was injured by stepping on a mine in the Izium region. He cautioned residents again about the risks, saying “the minefields left by the enemy are huge”. The claims have not been independently verified.
Hundreds of bodies found in Kharkiv after Russian’s left
In the northeastern Kharkiv region where Ukrainian forces regained a large swathe of ground in September, the bodies of 534 civilians including 19 children were found after Russian troops left, Serhiy Bolvinov of the National Police in Kharkiv told a briefing posted online Thursday.
The total included 447 bodies found in Izium, Reuters reports. He also said that investigators had found evidence of 22 sites being used as “torture rooms”. There was no immediate comment from Russia.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, appealed to Australia for help in a critical UN vote next week, asking Australian officials to join in diplomatic efforts to ensure it was ‘as unanimous as possible’. ‘I’m asking Australia to use all of its influence to convince as many countries as possible not to remain neutral and to vote for international law and against a Russian annexation,’ he said.
Addressing the Sydney-based Lowy Institute by video link, Zelenskiy revealed Australia was offering heavy arms to Ukraine in its next package of military support and thanked Australia for its ‘very meaningful defence’ assistance, saying the Bushmaster protected-mobility vehicles which the country had previously contributed had ‘performed masterfully’.
Julian Borger
Joe Biden has warned the world could face “Armageddon” if Vladimir Putin uses a tactical nuclear weapon to try to win the war in Ukraine.
The US president made his most outspoken remarks to date about the threat of nuclear war, at a Democratic fundraiser in New York, saying it was the closest the world had come to nuclear catastrophe for sixty years.
“We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis,” he said.
“We’ve got a guy I know fairly well,” Biden said, referring to the Russian president. “He’s not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is, you might say, significantly underperforming.”
Putin and his officials have repeatedly threatened to use Russia’s nuclear arsenal in an effort to deter the US and its allies from supporting Ukraine and helping it resist the all-out Russian invasion launched in February. One fear is that he could use a short range “tactical” nuclear weapon to try to stop Ukraine’s counter-offensive in its tracks and force Kyiv to negotiate and cede territory:
Ukraine takes back 500 square km of territory in a week, Zelenskiy says
Ukraine’s proclaimed wins in the southern region of Kherson are the latest in a series of Russian defeats undermining the Kremlin’s claim to have annexed around 20% of Ukraine.
“More than (500 square kilometres) have been liberated from Russian occupiers in the Kherson region alone” since the start of October, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced late Thursday in his nightly address.
The recaptured territory was home to dozens of towns and villages that had been occupied by Russian forces for months, southern army command spokeswoman Natalia Gumeniuk said.
Kherson, a region with an estimated pre-war population of around one million people, was captured early and easily by Moscow’s troops after their invasion launched on 24 February.
Welcome and Summary
Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war. My name is Helen Sullivan and I’ll be bringing you the latest for the next few hours.
My colleague Julian Borger reports from Washington that Joe Biden has warned the world could face “Armageddon” if Vladimir Putin uses a tactical nuclear weapon to try to win the war in Ukraine.
The US president made his most outspoken remarks to date about the threat of nuclear war, at a Democratic fundraiser in New York, saying it was the closest the world had come to nuclear catastrophe for sixty years.
“We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis,” he said.
Meanwhile here are the other key recent developments:
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The EU has imposed a new round of sanctions on Russia, expanding import and export bans and blacklisting individuals over Moscow’s annexation of four Ukrainian regions.
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Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the Ukrainian president, told European heads of state gathered in Prague that Ukraine must win so that Russia does not “advance on Warsaw or again on Prague”.
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The Russian opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza, who has been imprisoned in Moscow since April, is being investigated for “high treason”, as the authorities step up their case against him for his criticism of the war in Ukraine.
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The United States has accused Russian mercenaries of exploiting natural resources in Central African Republic, Mali, Sudan and elsewhere to help fund Moscow’s war in Ukraine, a charge Russia rejected as “anti-Russian rage”. The US ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, has said the Wagner Group of mercenaries are exploiting natural resources and “these ill-gotten gains are used to fund Moscow’s war machine in Africa, the Middle East and Ukraine”.
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Ukrainian emergency services said three bodies were pulled from rubble after a Russian rocket strike destroyed a five-storey apartment block in the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia.
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The Kremlin denied reports that 700,000 Russians had fled the country since Moscow announced a mobilisation drive it said would call up hundreds of thousands to fight in Ukraine.
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Two Russians who said they fled their country to avoid compulsory military service have requested asylum in the US after landing in a small boat on a remote Alaska island in the Bering Sea, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski’s office said Thursday.
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