Kiev has fully restored heating after one of the heaviest Russian bombardments of the capital last week took away critical civilian energy supplies and forced the national government to impose rolling blackouts, its mayor said.
Vitali Klitschko said on Sunday morning that the capital had managed to “restore all services after the latest shelling”, “in particular, the capital’s heating system has been fully restored. All sources of heat supply are functioning Work.”
Temperatures were below freezing in Kyiv and across the country on Sunday, with temperatures expected to drop to -6C (21.2F) by night. Up to a third of the capital’s three million people remained without power overnight, in what officials described as a “difficult and critical” situation.
A wave of Russian drone and missile attacks has wreaked havoc on Ukraine’s civilian energy and power infrastructure since October as the country entered a harsh winter. On Friday, Russia fired more than 70 missiles at Ukraine’s water and energy infrastructure in one of the heaviest attacks since its incursion began on February 24, knocking out power and cutting off heating and water.
Four people were also injured in Sunday’s shelling in Belgorod, Russia’s southern border region, the governor said, with witnesses reporting a loud explosion in the regional capital. In Ukraine, the center of Kherson was also shelled and Russian soldiers retreated from the main city last month in one of Moscow’s biggest battlefield setbacks since its invasion.
Britain’s Ministry of Defense said in its intelligence assessment on Sunday that low morale remained a “significant weakness” in the Russian army, and highlighted Moscow’s plan to form a creative brigade to boost morale using “military music and organized entertainment”.
The MoD in London expressed doubts that the new brigade would be able to compensate for “very high casualty rates, poor leadership, pay issues, lack of equipment and ammunition and unclear objectives of the war”.
Moscow said Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu had inspected troops involved in what it called a special military operation in Ukraine after the defense ministry announced this week the creation of a “front-line creative brigade” including singers and musicians to boost morale.
Russia’s RBC News quoted officials as saying the brigade would be made up of conscripted and volunteer professional artists tasked with maintaining a “high moral, political and psychological state.” [among] participants in special military operations”.
Shoigu “flew over the troop deployment area and inspected forward positions of Russian troops in the special military operations zone,” the ministry said, adding that he spoke with front-line troops. It’s not clear where.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday proposed a global peace summit this winter, and Kyiv wants to play a video message ahead of the World Cup final in Qatar.
Veteran US diplomat Henry Kissinger said in an interview published Sunday that the time was near for a negotiated peace that would reduce the risk of a devastating world war, but warned that dreams of dividing Russia could spark nuclear chaos .
Kissinger, 99, was secretary of state to Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and the architect of Cold War détente with the former Soviet Union. He has met with Russian President Vladimir Putin several times.
“Now is the time to build on the strategic changes already accomplished and integrate them into a new structure for negotiated peace,” Kissinger wrote in an essay for The Spectator.
“Peace process should link Ukraine to NATO, no matter how it is expressed. Neutral option no longer makes sense,” he wrote, adding that the desire to make Russia “powerless” or even seek disintegration – West and Ukraine Neither is being advocated – potentially causing confusion.
CIA Director William Burns said in an interview published Saturday that while most conflicts end in negotiations, the agency’s assessment is that Russia is not yet serious about real talks to end the war.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, said on Sunday that Russia’s war on Ukraine had “opened the gates of hell” and unleashed a world of violence from murder and rape in occupied territories to famine and debt in Africa and Europe. The power of “all evil” in the world.
He said that after visiting Ukraine last month, he was appalled by “the scale of the Buha mass grave, what was done to the people there, the rapes, the massacres, the pictures of torture by the Russian occupying forces”. .
