Russia-Ukraine war live: Kherson evacuees to start arriving in Russia; Kyiv says 600 settlements liberated this month

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Ukraine’s armed forces have liberated more than 600 settlements from the Russian occupation in the past month, including 75 in the highly strategic Kherson region, Ukraine’s Ministry for Reintegration of the Temporary Occupied Territories said.

Some 502 settlements have been liberated in the northeast Kharkiv region where Ukrainian forces last month advanced deep into Russian lines, the ministry said late on Thursday.

The ministry said 43 settlements were liberated in the Donetsk region and seven in the Luhansk region.

There was no immediate confirmation from Ukraine’s military or President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s office and the Guardian has not independently verified the battlefield reports.

“The area of liberated Ukrainian territories has increased significantly,” the ministry said in a statement on its website.

Evacuees from Ukraine’s southern Kherson region were expected to begin arriving in Russia on Friday, Reuters reports, after a Moscow-installed official suggested residents should leave for safety, a sign of Moscow’s weakening hold on territory it claims to have annexed.

“We suggested that all residents of the Kherson region, if they wish, to protect themselves from the consequences of missile strikes … go to other regions,” Russian-installed Kherson administration chief Vladimir Saldo said in a video message. People should “leave with their children”.

The offer applied foremost to residents on the west bank of the Dnipro River, he said. That includes the regional capital, the only major Ukrainian city Russia has captured intact since invading in February.

The first civilians fleeing from Kherson were due to arrive in Russia’s Rostov region on Friday, TASS news agency reported.

Kherson is one of four partially occupied Ukrainian provinces that Russia claims to have annexed in recent weeks, and arguably the most strategically important. It controls both the only land route to the Crimea peninsula Russia seized in 2014, and the mouth of the Dnipro, the 2,200-kilometre-long (1,367-mile-long) river that bisects Ukraine.

Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the war in Ukraine. My name is Helen Sullivan and I’ll be taking you through the latest for the next few hours.

Evacuees from Ukraine’s southern Kherson region are expected to begin arriving in Russia on Friday, Reuters reports, after a Moscow-installed official suggested residents should leave for safety, a sign of Russia’s weakening hold on territory it claims to have annexed.

Meanwhile Ukraine’s armed forces have liberated more than 600 settlements from the Russian occupation in the past month, including 75 in the highly strategic Kherson region, Ukraine’s Ministry for Reintegration of the Temporary Occupied Territories said late on Thursday, Reuters reports. There was no immediate confirmation from Ukraine’s military or President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s office and the Guardian has not independently verified the battlefield reports.

“The area of liberated Ukrainian territories has increased significantly,” the ministry said in a statement on its website.

We’ll have more on these developments shortly. In the meantime, here is a summary of the key recent news:

Russia announced it will evacuate residents from Kherson after an appeal from the Russian-installed head of the region, raising fears the occupied city at the heart of the southern Ukrainian region will become a new frontline.

Ukraine’s army boasted of territorial gains near the city of Kherson on Wednesday as Nato allies including the UK delivered new air defence systems in the wake of Russia’s recent missile attacks across the country.

The city of Mykolaiv, 60 miles north-west of Kherson city, was pummelled by Russian missiles, with one strike on a five-storey apartment block killing a 31-year-old man and an 80-year-old woman. Five further people were said to still be under rubble. Mykolaiv regional governor, Vitaliy Kim, said an 11-year-old boy was pulled from the rubble after six hours and rescue teams were searching for seven more people.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell warned Moscow that its forces would be “annihilated” by the west’s military response if president Vladimir Putin used nuclear weapons against Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, did not discuss ways to resolve the conflict in Ukraine at their bilateral meeting on Thursday, the state-run RIA news agency reported, citing the Kremlin. Instead, Putin courted Erdo?an with a plan to pump more Russian gas via Turkey that would turn it into a new supply “hub”, in a bid to preserve Russia’s energy leverage over Europe.

Russia said it had summoned diplomats from Germany, Denmark and Sweden to complain that representatives from Moscow and Gazprom had not been invited to join an investigation into ruptures of the Nord Stream gas pipelines. “Russia will obviously not recognise the pseudo-results of such an investigation unless Russian experts are involved,” the foreign ministry said.

Russia will run out of supplies and armaments before the west does, the UK defence secretary, Ben Wallace, claimed. He said procurement processes were in place among allies in the west that would ensure that the international community could continue arming Ukraine for years ahead.

Ukrainian officials claimed Iranians in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine were training Russians in how to use the Iranian-made Shahed-136 drone, which can conduct air-to-surface attacks, electronic warfare and targeting. Their deployment may indicate the Russian military is running out of its own drones.

Moscow has submitted its concerns to the United Nations about an agreement on Black Sea grain exports, and is prepared to reject renewing a deal next month unless its demands are addressed, Russia’s Geneva UN ambassador told Reuters.

Ukraine’s power grid has been “stabilised” after Russian strikes that targeted energy infrastructure, causing power and hot water cuts, the national energy operator Ukrenergo said Thursday.

A residential building in the southern Russian city of Belgorod near the Ukraine border was hit Thursday in shelling by Kyiv’s forces, the city governor said today. Mykhaylo Podolyak, a senior Ukrainian presidential adviser, denied Kyiv’s military was responsible and said Russia had tried to shell Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv on the border “but something went wrong”.

The admission of Ukraine to Nato could result in a third world war, the deputy secretary of the Russian security council, Alexander Venediktov, told Russian state Tass news agency in an interview on Thursday.