Russian strikes risked ‘nuclear catastrophe’, says Ukraine energy chief; Moscow says 50 PoWs freed – as it happened

The Guardian’s video team have published footage of medics at a hospital in the Ukrainian capital carrying out a cardiac operation on a child despite the city’s blackouts amid Russian missile strikes.

According to Borys Todurov, the surgeon who filmed the operation, it was already under way when the electricity supply was suddenly cut.

He said:

This is how we perform heart surgery today.

The first reactor of Ukraine’s Khmelnytskyi nuclear plant has been reconnected to the country’s power grid, regional governor Serhiy Hamaliy said.

The Khmelnytskyi plant disconnected from Ukraine’s grid on Wednesday after Russian strikes on the country’s power system, Ukrainian officials said.

Meanwhile, Russia’s Transneft said that pumping of oil through the Ukrainian section of the Druzhba pipeline had resumed at 6pm Moscow time, the TASS news agency reported, citing a company spokesperson.

US President Joe Biden has confirmed that a price cap on Russian oil being proposed by the United States and its western allies is “in play”, adding that he had spoken to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on the issue.

He made his comments to reporters during a Thanksgiving holiday visit to a fire station on Nantucket Island.

Reuters has the full detail on the prisoner of war swaps:

Russia and Ukraine have carried out the latest in a series of prisoner of war exchanges, with both sides handing over 50 people, officials in Kyiv and Moscow have confirmed.

Russia’s defence ministry said Ukraine had released 50 Russian soldiers who had been captured.

Andriy Yermak, head of the Ukrainian presidential administration, said on Telegram that Ukraine received 48 soldiers and two officers, among them marines, infantrymen, border guards and members of the territorial defence.

He said:

We have managed to bring back 19 defenders of Mariupol ... as well as 15 prisoners (of war) from the Chornobyl nuclear power plant and seven from Zmiiny Island.

Denis Pushilin, the Moscow-backed head of the part of Ukraine’s Donetsk region that is under Russian control, said earlier that a prisoner swap with Kyiv was taking place, involving 50 prisoners on each side.

Kyiv and Moscow have so far swapped over 1,000 prisoners of war since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine in February.

The Ukraine Solidarity Project, a group of European and Ukrainian activists who target brands with ties to Russia, has unfurled a 400m2 banner outside energy drink company Red Bull’s headquarters in Salzburg depicting Vladimir Putin riding the company’s famous bull logo.

The banner reads “Red Bull gives Putin wings” in reference to the company’s decision not to pull its products from Russian supermarkets.

Red Bull was given a failing D grade by the Yale School of Management’s Russia business policy ranking for having postponed future planned investment and marketing while continuing “substantive business” in Russia.

The Ukraine Solidarity Project said:

It really matters that Red Bull is still on sale in Russia. It’s one of the world’s biggest brands and its decision to stick with Putin’s Russia is highly significant. Companies that sell their products there are paying taxes to the Kremlin and signalling that they’re comfortable with the illegal invasion of Ukraine. They need to pull out. As things stand, Red Bull gives Putin wings.

Romania is willing to continue supplying neighbouring Moldova with electricity as Russian shelling in Ukraine hits its energy supply, but insufficient interconnections are a challenge, Romanian president Klaus Iohannis has said.

“Up until now we have delivered everything we were asked for,” Iohannis told reporters after meeting Lithuania’s president in Vilnius. “But outages happen because … Romanian-Moldovan interconnections are completely insufficient. Most of the power Romania is offering passes through Ukraine.”

Romanian power producers started selling electricity to Moldova at a capped price in October, Reuters reported.

Romania’s foreign minister, Bogdan Aurescu, said earlier this week the EU state was providing between 80% and 90% of Moldova’s electricity needs.

Foreign ministers from the G7 will discuss how to further support Ukraine in ensuring its energy supply during a meeting in Bucharest next week, German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock said.

“Russia’s attacks on civilian infrastructure are an intolerable, inhumane crime. Putin may plunge the people of Ukraine into cold and darkness with his missiles. He will never break their will for freedom and our support,” she added.

A meeting of Nato foreign ministers is scheduled to take place in Bucharest on Tuesday and Wednesday, Reuters reported.

A G7 foreign ministers meeting held in Germany earlier this month on Baerbock’s initiative focused on how to support Ukraine through the winter in the face of Russian attacks on its power grid.

Ukrainian cities were plunged into darkness this week after a barrage of Russian missiles triggered one of the worst nationwide power outages of the war yet.

Former German chancellor Angela Merkel said she had aimed to convene European talks with Vladimir Putin the year before his invasion of Ukraine but in the end did not see any possibility of influencing the Russian president at the end of her term.

Merkel told the Spiegel news magazine in an interview published on Thursday that she and French president Emmanuel Macron had planned to hold an independent talk format with Putin within the European Council in 2021, her last summer in office.

“But I no longer had the strength to push through because, after all, everyone knew: she’s leaving in autumn,” she said.

Merkel, who retired from politics after 16 years in power following Germany’s September 2021 election, officially handed over the reins to Olaf Scholz of the Social Democrats in December that year, Reuters reported. US president Joe Biden met the Russian leader in June 2021.

Referring to her farewell visit to Moscow in August 2021, Merkel, who speaks fluent Russian, told Spiegel:

The feeling was very clear: ‘In terms of power politics, you’re through.’ For Putin, only power counts.

The leaders of Poland and the Czech Republic have publicly criticised Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, over the war in Ukraine.

Reuters reports:

Unity within the Visegrad Group, set up in 1991 as the region emerged from decades of communist rule, has been sorely tested by the war, with Orbán opposing harsher European sanctions on Russia including on energy supplies.

By contrast, Hungary’s three Visegrad neighbours – which also include Slovakia – are among the EU’s toughest critics of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine.

The Czech prime minister, Petr Fiala, said as he headed for a meeting of Visegrad leaders in Slovakia on Thursday:

This is not the best of times for the (Visegrad) format, and Hungary’s different attitudes are significantly influencing and complicating the situation.

I make no secret of the fact that the views of the Hungarian prime minister, some of which can even be described as provocative, do not help this cooperation to proceed as well as in the past.

This week Orbán further annoyed his neighbours by wearing a scarf to a soccer match that depicted some Ukrainian territory as part of Hungary, prompting Kyiv to summon the Hungarian ambassador to lodge a protest.

Fiala said on Wednesday the “Greater Hungary” scarf – which also showed territory now in Austria, Slovakia, Romania, Croatia and Serbia as part of Hungary – would be discussed at Thursday’s summit gathering in the Slovak city of Kosice.

Poland, an ally of Hungary in their past disputes with the EU over the rule of law and human rights, has also turned more critical of Orbán because of his stance on Ukraine.

The Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, criticised Hungary’s failure so far to ratify Sweden and Finland’s application to join Nato.

He said:

I will tell (Orbán) directly that for Poland this is one of the most important changes in international law, that is the accession of Finland and Sweden.

We can’t allow the Visegrad Group to fall apart. It is a structure which protects the interests of our countries against other interest groups from western Europe.

Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko has provoked ire in Ukraine by suggesting that the end of the war is Ukraine’s responsibility, and that if it does not “stop”, it will end in the “complete destruction” of the country.

In a broadcast clip circulating on social media for its controversial comments, Lukashenko said that “everything is in Ukraine’s hands now if they don’t want a huge number of people to die”.

He said that similar to relations with Germany following the second world war, once the Ukraine war has concluded “we will make it all up”.

Advisor to Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs, Anton Gerashchenko, tweeted that this was “theatre of [the] absurd”.

Hungary has obtained an exemption from the EU’s proposed Russian oil price cap during talks in Brussels, according to the country’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó.

Szijjarto said at a briefing in Brussels broadcast on his Facebook page that the European Union’s current proposal says that oil deliveries though pipelines would be exempt from the price cap, which means it would not affect Hungary if the proposed cap is adopted later.

Russia does not plan to supply oil to countries supporting a price cap on Russian oil, the Kremlin has said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also said that Ukraine’s leadership could “end suffering” in Ukraine by meeting Russia’s demands to resolve the conflict.

Peskov was asked whether Russia was worried about the effect on the civilian population of its strikes on energy infrastructure, which have caused repeated mass blackouts.

Peskov said Russia attacked targets of military, not “social”, relevance.

Rachel Hall here taking over the blog for the next few hours. If there’s anything we’ve missed, do drop me a line at rachel.hall@theguardian.com.

Polish leaders say that an air defence system which Germany offered Poland would be best given to Ukraine to help it protect itself against Russian strikes.

Germany said earlier this week that it has offered Warsaw Eurofighter planes and Patriot defence systems to help defend Poland’s airspace after two men were killed when an apparently stray Ukrainian defence projectile fell in Poland near the border with Ukraine, the Associated Press reported.

Poland’s defence minister, Mariusz Błaszczak, initially said he received Germany’s offer with “satisfaction”.

But following Russia’s heavy barrage of Ukraine on Wednesday, Polish leaders said it would be better if the defence systems were placed in western Ukraine.

The head of Poland’s ruling party, Jarosław Kaczyński, called Germany’s offer “interesting” but said he believed “it would be best for Poland’s security if Germany handed the equipment to the Ukrainians, trained Ukrainian teams, with the caveat that the batteries would be placed in Ukraine’s west”.

Ukraine’s ambassador to Warsaw, Vasyl Zvarych, thanked Błaszczak, saying on Twitter that Ukraine needs as many air defence weapons as it can get.

Russia is not planning contact with the United States and did not initiate contact with Washington at the G20 summit in Indonesia, the deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, said on Thursday.

He added that contacts with Washington happen over the phone but take place through diplomatic channels and not at a presidential level.

Meanwhile, Russia’s federal security service (FSB) claimed it has prevented Ukrainian special services from carrying out what it said was sabotage on the “South Stream” gas pipeline, Russian news agencies reported.

The pipeline was a project intended to transport Russian gas through the Black Sea to Bulgaria, although was later cancelled in favour of TurkStream.

Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, has said contacts with the UN nuclear watchdog over safety at the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine were “constructive” and showed some promise.

The Zaporizhzhia plant, which Russia seized shortly after its invasion, was again rocked by shelling last weekend, prompting renewed calls from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to create a protection zone around it to prevent a nuclear disaster.

The head of the UN nuclear watchdog met a Russian delegation in Istanbul on Wednesday to discuss safety at the plant, which both Ukraine and Moscow have accused each other of shelling, Reuters reported.

Hungary will provide €187m ($195m) in financial aid to Ukraine as its contribution to a planned EU support package worth up to €18bn in 2023, according to a government decree.

Prime minister Viktor Orbán’s government has said it was willing to pay its share of support for Ukraine but would rather pay it bilaterally than through the EU’s joint borrowing, Reuters reported.

“The government continues to be committed to take part in financial support to war-gripped Ukraine,” the government said in the decree.

“So it calls on the finance minister to make sure to provide the €187m that would be Hungary’s share in the €18bn EU loan to be granted to Ukraine.”

The decree, signed by Orbán, also says that the Hungarian foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, should start talks with Ukraine to work out an agreement needed for the financial assistance.

To secure the funds for the loans, which Ukraine will have to repay within 35 years, the European Commission would borrow on the capital markets.

However, proposals for the package will need to be approved by the European parliament and the EU’s 27 member states and Hungary said it would not take part in joint borrowing.

Ukraine expects three nuclear power plants that were switched off because of Russian missile strikes on Wednesday will be operating again by Thursday evening, energy minister German Galushchenko said.

“We expect that by evening the nuclear power plants will start working, providing energy to the network, and this will significantly reduce the [energy] deficit,” he said in comments broadcast on national television.

More than two-thirds of the Ukrainian capital was still without power on Thursday morning and a number of residents had no running water, a day after Russian missile strikes caused Kyiv’s biggest outages in nine months of war.

The capital was one of the main targets of the latest wave of attacks on energy facilities that cut power in many regions and made emergency blackouts necessary in others to conserve energy and enable repairs as winter sets in.

The temperature plunged below zero degrees Celsius overnight in a city that had 2.8 million residents before the war and where it is already snowing and the streets are icy, Reuters reported.

Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said electricians and repair workers were doing everything to get the power back on “as fast as possible” but the recovery would depend largely on the overall energy “balance” of the nationwide grid.

Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy chief of president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s staff, said power supplies had been restored in the Kirovohrad and Vinnytsia regions.

In the south, the Mykolaiv region’s governor, Vitaliy Kim, appealed to Ukrainians to be as frugal as possible in their use of power.

“Consumption has been growing this morning [which is logical], there isn’t enough capacity in the system to switch it on for more consumers!!,” he wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

“The energy system is united like we all are! If you’ve turned off a few unneeded lights, that’s really important!!!”

Ukrainian servicemen shoot towards Russian positions on the frontline near Kherson, southern Ukraine.

Ground battles continue to rage in eastern Ukraine, where Russia is pressing an offensive along a stretch of frontline west of the city of Donetsk, which has been held by its proxies since 2014, Reuters reports.

Ukraine’s general staff said Russian forces tried again to make advances on their main targets in the Donetsk region - Bakhmut and Avdiivka. Russian forces shelled both areas and used incendiary devices to set Ukrainian positions ablaze with only limited success, the general staff said.

Among those fighting the Russians in Bakhmut are a unit of Chechen fighters, who hope a Ukrainian victory could spark political crisis in Russia and bring down the powerful pro-Moscow leader of Chechnya.

Further south, Russian forces were digging in on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River, the general staff said, shelling areas on the west bank including the town of Kherson, which was recently reclaimed by Ukrainian forces.

Reuters was not able to immediately verify the battlefield accounts.

On Wednesday, Ukraine’s military said Russian forces had fired about 70 cruise missiles at targets across the country and also deployed attack drones.

The strikes killed 10 people and disconnected three nuclear power stations from the grid, officials said.

The country’s energy ministry said supplies were cut to “the vast majority of electricity consumers”. All of Kyiv lost water, the capital’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said. The city’s administration said water and heating would return to residential buildings on Thursday morning.

Late Wednesday, the deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office said that Kyiv and over a dozen regions, including Lviv and Odesa in the south, had been reconnected to the power grid.

Klitschko said 21 out of 31 missiles targeting Kyiv were shot down before they reached their targets. One of the 10 that evaded the defences hit an apartment block in Vyshgorod, a northern suburb of the city, killing three people and wounding 15.

There was a kindergarten in the lower ground floor of the building, but it was evacuated after air raid sirens went off. The blast left a three-metre crater in front of the building, destroyed apartments around it, blew the tops off nearby trees and ruined a children’s playground.

Earlier in the day, a newborn baby was killed when a Russian rocket struck a hospital maternity ward in southern Ukraine. Ukraine’s state emergency service said a woman with her two-day-old baby and a doctor were in the facility in the town of Vilniansk, close to the city of Zaporizhzhia, when it was hit. The mother and the doctor were pulled alive from the rubble by rescue workers but the baby died, it said on the Telegram messaging app.

Lorenzo Tondo and Julian Borger report from Kyiv:

Fresh Russian strikes battered Ukraine’s already failing electricity grid, causing blackouts across the country and in neighbouring Moldova, in attacks Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told the UN were “an obvious crime against humanity”.

Addressing an urgent meeting of the UN security council late on Wednesday, Zelenskiy said Ukraine would put forward a resolution condemning “any forms of energy terror”. Referring to Russia’s likely veto, he said: “It’s nonsense that the veto right is secured for the party that wages this war.

“We cannot be hostage to one international terrorist,” Zelenskiy said.

He also invited the UN to send experts to examine and evaluate Ukraine’s critical infrastructure.

“When we have the temperature below zero, and scores of millions of people without energy supplies, without heating, without water, this is an obvious crime against humanity,” Zelenskiy told the security council via video link: