UNITED NATIONS: The UN Security Council will meet on Monday to discuss Ukraine, a revised scheduled showed, after Kyiv’s mayor urged residents to leave the capital due to mass heating outages caused by Russian strikes. “The Russian Federation has reached an appalling new level of war crimes and crimes against humanity by its terror against civilians,” Ukrainian ambassador Andriy Melnyk said in a letter to the Security Council. The latest strikes left half of the residential buildings in Kyiv without heating in sub-zero temperatures, Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said. The Kremlin also confirmed firing an Oreshnik ballistic missile on Ukraine for the second time since the war began in February 2022.
“The Russian Federation regime officially claims that it used an intermediate-range ballistic missile, the so-called ‘Oreshnik’, against the Lviv region,” the ambassador’s letter continued. “Such a strike represents a grave and unprecedented threat to the security of the European continent.” Moscow claims the Oreshnik, which can be equipped with both nuclear and conventional warheads, is impossible to stop Ukraine’s request for the emergency UNSC meeting was supported by six members — France, Latvia, Denmark, Greece, Liberia and the United Kingdom.
Mass heating outages caused by Russian strikes on Kyiv are set to last into the weekend, as the capital’s mayor called on residents to temporarily leave the city with sub-zero temperatures expected to fall even lower. A massive missile and drone attack on Kyiv killed four and ripped open apartment blocks. Moscow also fired its feared Oreshnik ballistic missile at western Ukraine, drawing condemnation from Europe.
The barrage came hours after Moscow rejected a plan by Kyiv and its Western allies to deploy peacekeeping forces to Ukraine should a ceasefire be reached. “Moscow is trying to use cold weather as a tool of terror,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said at a meeting in Kyiv with British Defence Secretary John Healey. He said 20 residential buildings in Kyiv had been damaged, including the Qatari embassy, in one of the largest attacks on the capital for months.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the raid, saying attacks on civilian infrastructure are against international law and “unacceptable, unjustifiable, and must stop immediately,” according to his spokesman. Qatar expressed “deep regret” over the embassy hit and said that none of its staff there had been harmed. Russia denied targeting the area around the mission and claimed it was damaged by a Ukrainian air defence missile.
The Russian barrage left around half of all apartment blocks in the capital, some 6,000 buildings, without heating, Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said.
Temperatures are set to fall to -15C on Saturday. Officials said they were hopeful some heating could be restored on Friday night. “In some areas where the damage is more complex, additional time is needed,” Ukraine’s Restoration Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said. Klitschko said the situation was “very difficult” and called on “residents of the capital who have the opportunity to temporarily leave the city for places with alternative sources of power and heat to do so”.
In his regular nightly address, Zelensky urged officials not to “run away from problems, but solve them, especially when there are resources for this, as in Kyiv”. City authorities said they had set up 1,200 warming centres. In one of the centres, journalists saw people warming up with tea and charging devices, while parts of the city were plunged into darkness.
Russia has shown no sign of slowing down its ground offensive or aerial bombardments. Moscow’s defence ministry said it had fired the Oreshnik ballistic missile on “strategic targets” — only the second time the new weapon, which the Kremlin says is impossible to stop, is known to have been used. Ukrainian authorities said a ballistic missile travelling “at about 13,000 kilometres per hour” had struck an “infrastructure facility” near the western city of Lviv. — AFP
