Russia unleashed its largest air strike on Ukraine in almost three months on Sunday, launching 120 missiles and 90 drones that killed at least seven people and caused severe damage to the power system, said officials.
President Joe Biden’s administration has lifted restrictions that had blocked Ukraine from using US-provided weapons to strike deep into Russian territory, said three sources familiar with the matter, in a significant change to US policy in the Ukraine-Russia conflict.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said his conversation with Putin on Friday had given no indication of a shift in the Russian president’s thinking on the war in Ukraine, but defended his much-criticised decision to phone the Kremlin.
Biden lifts ban on Ukraine using US arms to strike inside Russia
President Joe Biden’s administration has lifted restrictions that had blocked Ukraine from using US-provided weapons to strike deep into Russian territory, said three sources familiar with the matter, in a significant change to US policy in the Ukraine-Russia conflict.
Ukraine plans to conduct its first long-range attacks in the coming days, said the sources, without revealing details due to operational security concerns.
The White House declined to comment.
The move by the US, which comes just over two months before Trump takes office on 20 January, comes after months of requests by Zelensky to allow Ukraine’s military to use US weapons to hit Russian military targets far from its border.
The change follows Russia’s deployment of North Korean ground troops to supplement its forces, a development that has caused alarm in Washington and Kyiv.
The first deep strikes are likely to be carried out using Atacms rockets, which have a range of up to 306 km, according to the sources.
While some US officials have expressed scepticism that allowing long-range strikes will change the war’s overall trajectory, the decision could help Ukraine at a moment when Russian forces are making gains and possibly put Kyiv in a better negotiating position when and if ceasefire talks happen.
It is not clear if Trump will reverse Biden’s decision when he takes office. Trump has long criticised the scale of US financial and military aid to Ukraine and has vowed to end the war quickly, without explaining how.
Still, some congressional Republicans have urged Biden to loosen the rules on how Ukraine can use US-provided weapons.
Russia has warned that it would see a move to loosen the limits on Ukraine’s use of US weapons as a major escalation.
Russia pounds Ukraine’s power grid in massive air strike
Russia unleashed its largest air strike on Ukraine in almost three months on Sunday, launching 120 missiles and 90 drones that killed at least seven people and caused severe damage to the power system, said officials.
Ukrainians had been bracing for weeks for a renewed Russian attack on an already hobbled energy system, fearing long winter blackouts and mounting psychological pressure almost 1,000 days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion.
The strikes, which caused numerous power cuts, came at a time when the impending US presidency of Donald Trump, who has pledged to end the war without saying how, has raised the prospect of a push for negotiations.
Air defences could be heard engaging drones over the capital, Kyiv, in the night, and a series of powerful blasts boomed across the city centre during the missile attack. Residents huddled in underground metro stations, wrapped in winter coats.
“Severe damage to Ukraine’s energy system, including to DTEK power stations. These attacks again highlight Ukraine’s need for additional air defence systems from our allies,” said Maxim Timchenko, the CEO of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private power company.
All Ukrainian regions would experience temporary restrictions on power on Monday, said DTEK.
Officials confirmed damage to “critical infrastructure” or power cuts in regions from Volyn, Rivne and Lviv in the west to Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia in the southeast.
DTEK imposed emergency power cuts in the southern Odesa region, but had lifted them in three other regions by late morning. Emergency work was ongoing in the Odesa, Rivne and Volyn regions, said national grid operator Ukrenergo.
Russia’s defence ministry said it had launched a massive strike on energy facilities that supply Ukraine’s military-industrial complex.
“The enemy’s target was our energy infrastructure across Ukraine,” said President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Kyiv’s air force said it had destroyed 104 of the incoming 120 missiles and shot down 42 drones. Another 41 disappeared from radar, it said.
At least seven people were killed, in the regions of Lviv, Mykolaiv, Odesa and Dnipropetrovsk, said authorities.
Moldovan Deputy Prime Minister Mihai Popsoi said Russian missiles and drones had violated Moldovan airspace during the attack. Nato member Poland, which also borders Ukraine, said it had scrambled its air force as a precaution.
Russia last launched a major barrage at Kyiv on 26 August, when officials said it had fired more than 200 drones and missiles at targets across Ukraine.
Its latest onslaught piles more pressure on Ukraine as Moscow’s troops notch up their fastest battlefield gains in the east since 2022 in their effort to seize the entire industrial Donbas region.
Ukrainian troops are meanwhile trying to hold an area of land that they seized in Russia’s Kursk region in August, something Kyiv has said could one day be a bargaining chip.
Sybiha said the strike appeared to be Moscow’s “true response” to leaders contacting President Vladimir Putin, an apparent swipe at German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who called the Russian leader on Friday for the first time in two years.
Though Scholz urged Putin to pull out his troops, which occupy a fifth of Ukraine, Kyiv bridled at a call that it said reduced Putin’s isolation.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk echoed Sybiha: “The attack last night, one of the biggest in this war, has proved that telephone diplomacy cannot replace real support from the whole West for Ukraine. The next weeks will be decisive, not only for the war itself, but also for our future."
Germany’s Scholz defends call to Putin ahead of snap elections
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said his conversation with Putin on Friday had given no indication of a shift in the Russian president’s thinking on the war in Ukraine, but defended his much-criticised decision to phone the Kremlin.
Scholz’s hour-long call with Putin, their first direct communication in almost two years, comes three months before snap elections in which the wildly unpopular chancellor faces a stiff challenge from populists of the left and the right who are demanding a resumption of diplomacy.
Critics, including Zelensky, said the call was a breach of Western solidarity for the sake of domestic political advantage.
“It was important to tell him [Putin] that he cannot count on support from Germany, Europe and many others in the world waning,” Scholz told reporters.
“The conversation was very detailed but contributed to a recognition that little has changed in the Russian President’s views of the war — and that’s not good news.”
The call comes amid signs of growing contact between Western-aligned leaders and the Kremlin, even as Russia makes small but steady battlefield gains in Ukraine’s east.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres attended a BRICS summit in Russia, while Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is expected to attend a security summit in EU member Malta in December.
Trump has appointed to his cabinet some security figures seen as being better disposed towards Moscow than their predecessors.
This had implications for Europe, said Scholz.
“In my view, it would not be a good idea if there were talks between the American and Russian presidents and the leader of an important European country was not also doing so,” he said.
Russia resells more gas in Europe after cutting off Austria
Russian gas flows to Austria were suspended for a second day on Sunday because of a pricing dispute, but other buyers in Europe stepped in to snap up unsold volumes, companies and sources said and data showed.
Russia, which before the Ukraine war was the biggest single supplier of gas to Europe, has lost most of its buyers on the continent as the EU tries to cut its dependence on Russian energy.
Russian gas is still being sold in significant volumes to Slovakia and Hungary, as well as to the Czech Republic which does not have a direct contract. Smaller volumes are going to Italy and Serbia.
Gazprom on Saturday halted supplies to OMV Austria, that had been receiving 17 million cubic metres a day before the cut-off, and those volumes are now finding new buyers in Europe.
Slovak state-owned firm SPP said it was still receiving gas from Russia and suggested others were buying more because there was still “great interest” in Russian gas in Europe.
A source familiar with Russian gas supplies in Europe said gas was still cheaper from Russia than from many other sources, so Austrian volumes had quickly been resold.
He declined to name the companies which bought gas previously destined for Austria. Austria has said it has plentiful gas stocks to cover the shortfall and can import from Germany and Italy when needed.
The European gas market has been sensitive to geopolitical developments and supply issues, with the end of Ukraine gas transit expected at the end of the year.
Colder temperatures in Europe have also been driving up heating demand, leading to withdrawals from EU gas storage sites earlier than last year.
“Supply and weather drivers have created concerns about end-of-winter gas stocks which, given the EU’s storage targets, might imply a need to buy significant [liquefied natural gas] volumes in the summer,” said BNP Paribas senior commodities strategist Aldo Spanjer.
At its peak, Russia was supplying 35% of Europe’s gas, but since the Ukraine war started in 2022 Gazprom has lost market share to Norway, the US and Qatar.
The company’s remaining flows to Europe are not expected to continue for much longer, with the Soviet-era pipeline via Ukraine due to shut at the end of this year as Kyiv does not want to extend a transit agreement.
The Yamal-Europe pipeline via Belarus has already closed after a dispute, while Russia blamed the US and Britain for explosions under the Baltic Sea that closed the Nord Stream route.
Zelensky says Ukraine must do everything to end war next year
Zelensky said Ukraine must do all it can to ensure the war with Russia ends next year through diplomacy, commenting at a decisive moment after Trump’s US presidential election win and Russia’s grinding battlefield gains.
However, Zelensky said Putin was not interested in agreeing to a peace deal, and argued it was convenient for Moscow to sit down to talk while continuing to fight.
“From our side, we must do everything so that this war ends next year, ends through diplomatic means,” said Zelensky in a Ukrainian radio interview aired on Saturday.
Moscow’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva said on Thursday that Russia would be open to negotiations to end the war if initiated by Trump, although he added that they would have to acknowledge “realities on the ground”.
Moscow uses this phrase to mean Ukraine would have to cede four regions that Russian forces have partly occupied and that Russia has claimed in their entirety.
Zelensky has repeatedly said since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 that peace cannot be established until all Russian forces are expelled and all territory captured by Moscow, including Crimea, is returned.
However, a return to Ukraine’s internationally recognised 1991 borders was not mentioned in the president’s “victory plan” that he publicly presented last month.
Zelensky said the war was likely to end quicker under Trump, who said often during his campaign that he would rapidly end the conflict, without giving specifics.
He conceded that the situation in eastern Ukraine was difficult and Russia was making advances.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said on Saturday its forces had captured two more villages in the eastern Donetsk region — Makarivka, southwest of the key town of Kurakhove, and Hryhorivka, north of Kurakhove.
Ukraine’s General Staff of the Armed Forces made no mention of either village, but acknowledged that the Kurakhove sector was the most heated theatre along the 1,000 frontline.
Moscow’s forces are bearing down on Kurakhove, which has a thermal power plant and is 7km from Pokrovsk, a large town which for much of the war has been one of Ukraine’s logistical linchpins.
In eastern Ukraine, Russia is advancing at the fastest rate since the war’s earliest days in 2022.
Zelensky said the situation was difficult for several reasons, one of which was hold-ups of up to a year in equipping brigades, partly because of months of delay by the US Congress last winter in approving Ukraine aid.
Some of these brigades, he said, would now enter the fray.
“In order to stop the Russian army, new reserves, kitted out with the equipment we have been waiting for so long, will now arrive,” he said.
Three Russians and a Belarusian held in Chad return to Moscow
A group of three Russians and a Belarusian national, detained in the central African state of Chad for more than a month, flew back to Moscow on Saturday, reported Russian media.
State news agency RIA said the group included Maxim Shugalei, identified as a sociologist but described by Western journalists and institutions, including the European Union, as an official linked to the late head of Russia’s Wagner Group, a private army.
“Three Russians and a citizen of Belarus, who were detained and held in Chad, have been freed and arrived in Moscow this evening,” RIA quoted “colleagues” of Shugalei as saying.
The Moscow daily Kommersant said the return of the four men had been confirmed by the Fund to Protect National Values, a group promoting Russian cultural interests abroad.
Russian media reported that Shugalei and a second man identified as Samir Seifan were detained at the airport in the Chad capital, Ndjamena, in September, with no reason given.
RIA said the Chadian ambassador to Moscow, Adam Bechir, subsequently announced that President Mahamat Idriss Deby had ordered that the four men be released and handed over to Russian authorities.
Kommersant said it had learnt that their detention was linked to an article in the French-based magazine Jeune Afrique identifying Shugalei as a close associate of Wagner’s founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin. RIA said Russia’s Foreign Ministry had taken “all the necessary measures” to secure their release.
The Wagner group played a major role in Russia’s war in Ukraine until its forces staged a rebellion in June 2023, briefly threatening to march on Moscow from southern Russia. Prigozhin was killed a month later in a plane crash.
Russia has sought to win friends throughout Africa and made particularly deep inroads in Burkina Faso, Mali and the Central African Republic through private military and business networks. Since Prigozhin’s death, Moscow has sought to centralise operations under the Africa Corps.
Shugalei is subject to EU sanctions on the grounds of overseeing disinformation campaigns to promote Wagner in Africa. Kommersant said he and Seifan had been detained in Libya in 2019 on allegations of trying to manipulate elections.
G7 confirms pledge to impose severe costs on Russia for Ukraine war
Leaders of the Group of Seven (G7) major democracies on Saturday reiterated a pledge to keep imposing severe costs on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, through sanctions, export controls and other measures, and vowed to support Kyiv for as long as it takes.
“Russia remains the sole obstacle to just and lasting peace,” said a joint statement published on Saturday, adopted “in support of Kyiv as the thousandth day of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine approaches”.
Italy holds the 2024 rotating presidency of the G7, which also includes the US, Canada, Japan, France, Germany and Britain.
“The G7 confirms its commitment to imposing severe costs on Russia through sanctions, export controls and other effective measures. We stand united with Ukraine,” added the statement. DM