Russia-Ukraine war live: Russia ramping up attacks in Donetsk, says Ukraine | Ukraine

A man who used his finger to write “No to war” on a snow-covered turnstile outside a Moscow ice rink has been jailed for 10 days.

Court papers said Dmitry Fyodorov wrote the message on 23 November and was detained by police shortly after, Reuters reports.

The message is believed to have been considered an offence under a law targeting anyone deemed to have acted to discredit Russia’s armed forces.

Nearly 20,000 people are thought to have been detained and 800 criminal cases opened under laws cracking down on dissent introduced following the invasion of Ukraine.

Russia is likely to have begun more frequent use of 500kg cluster munition bombs in Ukraine, according to British intelligence.

In its latest daily update, the Ministry of Defence said the RBK-500 bomb is reported to have been deployed in multiple areas in the eastern Donetsk region.

It said the RBK-500 ejects 100-350 submunitions, and that each sub-munition detonates with either a single anti-tank charge or hundreds of high-velocity fragments.

Earlier this year, the US began supplying cluster munitions to Ukraine to aid its efforts to break through Russia’s frontlines.

Cluster munitions have been prohibited under an international treaty because their sub-munitions scatter over a large area and often fail to explode on impact, increasing the risk of civilian casualties.

None of Russia, the US, or Ukraine have signed up to the treaty.

Here are some of the latest images coming through from Ukraine:

Russian forces have taken control of a village in the east Ukrainian region of Donetsk, according to Russia’s defence ministry.

Khromove, which Russia calls Artyomovskoe, is situated on the western edge of Bakhmut, a city that fell to Russia over summer after a months-long battle and which remains the scene of heavy fighting.

Before the start of the war, Khromove had a population of about 1,000 people.

Reuters, which reported the ministry’s claim, could not independently verify whether the Russians now held the village.

Five Russian officials killed in strike in Kherson, says Ukraine

Ukraine has hailed the return of Scythian gold treasures as a “symbolic and historic” victory over Russia, which had laid claim to the artefacts in a decade-long struggle over ownership.

On Tuesday the collection, including a rare golden neck ornament and a solid gold helmet, was shown off in Kyiv. They are among 1,000 items lent in 2013 by four museums in Crimea for an exhibition in the Netherlands.

The following year – with the artefacts still out of the country – Vladimir Putin annexed the Black Sea peninsula. Ukraine and the museums in Moscow-occupied territory both demanded the Scythian finds be sent back to them.

After a lengthy battle the Dutch supreme court ruled in June that the items belonged to Ukraine. The Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam removed them from storage and dispatched them to Kyiv in a truck. They arrived on Sunday at Pechersk Lavra monastery in the capital.

“We returned home not just valuables that were taken out of Crimea in 2013, but a part of our history,” said Vasyl Malyuk, the head of Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency, which coordinated the shipment. “For us, as well as for our country in general, this case is symbolic. It shows that Ukraine never gives up what belongs to it by law.”

Read Luke Harding’s full story here:

The burden of providing assistance to Ukraine is being shared between the US and its Nato allies, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has said.

Speaking at the meeting of Nato foreign ministers in Brussels, Blinken sought to counter those within the US who have claimed the country is providing more than its fair share to Ukraine and called for a reduction in financial and military aid.

“The United States is not standing alone,” he said. “We’ve provided about $77bn in assistance to Ukraine. Our European allies, over the same period of time, have provided more than $110bn.

“We often talk about burden sharing and the imperative of burden sharing. When it comes to Ukraine, that’s clearly what we’ve seen and what we continue to see.”

We must not underestimate Russia, says Nato chief

Russian casualties reach 327,580, according to Ukraine

The opening salvo in Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year was not a rocket or a missile. Rather, it was an essay.

Vladimir Putin’s On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, published in summer 2021, ranged over 1,000 years of history in its 7,500 words to assert that the two countries are “one people”.

Now, 90 international and Ukrainian historians are coming together under the umbrella of the new London-based Ukrainian History Global Initiative to wrest Ukraine’s past from the shadow of Russian and Soviet narratives.

The historians want Ukraine’s history to take its place among a wealth of global stories – from the part it played in the history of the ancient Greeks who founded trading emporia on the Black Sea, to its connections with Byzantium, and its links with the Vikings who ruled the medieval polity of Kyivan Rus.

Read Charlotte Higgins’s full story here:

The European Union has delivered about 300,000 of the 1m shells it has promised to Ukraine, the Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, has said.

In March, the EU’s defence ministers announced a €1bn plan for the joint procurement of extra ammunition by the Brussels-based European Defence Agency.

Earlier this month, the German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, said the bloc would miss its target to deliver the rounds by March 2024.

Speaking to reporters this morning at a Nato meeting in Brussels, Kuleba said there was a need for greater alignment of Ukrainian and Nato arms production to ensure Ukraine receives the supplies it needs.

“We need to create a Euro-Atlantic common area of defence industries,” he said.

In September, the British defence company BAE Systems announced it was setting up a local entity in Ukraine to help ramp up its supply of weapons and equipment.

The Russian navy had kept two submarines with up to eight Kalibr missiles on combat duty in the Black Sea as of Tuesday evening, according to Ukraine.

“The missile threat level is high,” Ukraine’s navy said on Telegram.

The US-based thinktank the Institute for the Study of War said earlier that extreme weather had forced Russia to withdraw its fleet to port, but submarines can dive to avoid bad weather.

Ukraine says it repelled 21 out of 21 overnight drone attacks

Russian air defence forces destroyed a drone flying towards Moscow overnight, the city’s mayor has said.

Writing on Telegram early this morning, Sergei Sobyanin said the drone was shot down over the southern district of Podolsk.

“According to preliminary data, there was no damage or casualties at the site where the debris fell,” he said.

“Emergency services specialists are working at the scene.”

Recent months have seen numerous drone attacks by Ukraine on the Russian capital.

Bad weather has slowed Russia’s campaign to secure eastern Ukraine and capture the town of Avdiivka, Ukrainian officials have said.

After two days of storms – and snow in the south – the forecast was for more rain in the east, leaving the ground sodden and unsuitable for military manoeuvres.

“They’ve started to shell the town centre from Donetsk. Our brigade is holding its ground, but we can’t see any equipment coming,” Serhiy Tsekhotskyi, a Ukrainian officer in the town, told national television.

“The weather is unsuitable. But once the frosts come and the ground hardens, an attempted assault with equipment is possible.”

Another military spokesperson, Volodymyr Fitio, said the weather had forced the Russians to also make “adjustments”.

“You cannot advance when the ground is like this,” Fitio told the media outlet Espreso TV. “The Russians previously brought in reserves and threw them into battle. There are a lot fewer movements like that now because of the weather.”

Summary