Russia-Ukraine war live: wave of drone attacks on Kyiv for second night

A Ukrainian orphan taken from Mariupol after Russian forces captured the Ukrainian city in the first weeks of its invasion has returned home, Kyiv said on Sunday.

The case of Bogdan Yermokhin, who turned 18 on Sunday, made international headlines after Russia issued him a draft summons to report for mandatory military conscription before his 18th birthday.

It was announced he would return on 10 November and today Kyiv said he had made it back to Ukraine after a series of negotiations involving officials in Moscow, Kyiv and Belarus.

“Our team managed to bring home Bogdan Yermokhin, a Ukrainian boy who was taken by Russia from occupied Mariupol to the Moscow region,” said Andriy Yermak, the Ukrainian president’s chief of staff.

The Kremlin has been accused of illegally transferring thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia, and the international criminal court has issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin over the alleged deportations.

Yermokhin’s return was brokered by Qatar and the UN children’s agency, Unicef, said Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets in a social media post.

He also published a photo of Yermokhin holding a Ukrainian flag at the border.

“An attempt by the Kyiv regime to carry out a terrorist attack using a drone against facilities of the Russian Federation was thwarted,” the Russian defence ministry said in a statement.

Ukrainian drone attacks on Moscow were particularly frequent in the spring, before the launch of its counteroffensive in June, but they have been rare in recent weeks.

According to the Russian ministry, the drone in question “was destroyed by the air defence equipment … over the territory of the Bogorodsky urban district, in the Moscow region”.

Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said later on Telegram that the foiled attack “did not cause any damage or casualties”.

The pro-war Russian nationalist Igor Girkin, who is in custody awaiting trial for inciting extremism, said on Sunday he wanted to run for president even though he understood the March election would be a “sham” with the winner already clear.

Girkin, who is also known by the alias Igor Strelkov, has repeatedly said Russia faces revolution and even civil war unless Vladimir Putin’s military leadership fights the war in Ukraine more effectively.

A former Federal Security Service officer who helped Russia to annex Crimea in 2014 and then to organise pro-Russia militias in eastern Ukraine, Girkin said before his arrest that he and his supporters were entering politics.

“I understand perfectly well that in the current situation in Russia, participating in the presidential campaign is like sitting down at a table to play with card sharps,” Girkin said in a letter published by his account on Telegram.

Girkin said he did not think he would be allowed to take part in the election, but hoped that his attempt to unite patriotic forces would disrupt the Kremlin’s plan for a “sham election” in which “the only winner is known in advance”.

“This is our chance to unite in the face of external and internal threats,” Girkin said in the post, which was titled: “I am going to run.”

The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said in an interview published on Friday that he hoped Putin would run in the March election for another term as president, a move that would keep Putin in power until at least 2030.

The Ukrainian army said on Sunday that it had pushed Russian forces back “three to eight kilometres” from the banks of the Dnipro River, which if confirmed would be the first meaningful advance by Kyiv’s forces months into a disappointing counteroffensive.

“Preliminary figures vary from three to eight kilometres, depending on the specifics, geography and landscape design of the left bank,” the army spokesperson Natalia Gumenyuk told Ukrainian television, without specifying whether Ukraine’s military had complete control of the area or if the Russians had retreated.

“The enemy still continues artillery fire on the right bank,” she said, estimating that “several tens of thousands” of Russian troops were in the area.

“We have a lot of work to do,” she added.

Five people including a three-year-old girl were injured in Russian artillery shelling of Kherson on Sunday morning, the Ukrainian interior minister, Ihor Klymenko, said.

“All of them sustained shrapnel wounds. The child and the grandmother were walking in the yard. Enemy artillery hit them near the entrance,” Klymenko said on the Telegram messaging app.

And now a latest update on the fight at the Dnipro River, where Ukrainian troops were aiming to push back Russian forces positioned on the east bank, the Ukrainian military says, according to the AP.

The wide river is a natural dividing line along the southern battlefront. Since withdrawing from the city of Kherson and retreating across the river a year ago, Moscow’s forces have regularly shelled communities on the Ukrainian-held side of the river to prevent Kyiv’s troops from advancing toward Russia-annexed Crimea.

The Ukrainians are trying to “push back Russian army units as far as possible in order to make life easier for the (western) bank of the Kherson region, so that they get shelled less,” Natalia Humeniuk, the spokesperson for Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command, said.

In response, the Russian military used “tactical aviation”, including Iranian-made Shahed exploding drones, to try to pin down Ukraine’s troops, Humeniuk said.

The general staff of Ukraine’s armed forces said its troops there had repelled 12 attacks by the Russian army between Friday and Saturday, the AP reports.

More now on those drone attacks reported in Kyiv.

Serhiy Popko, the head of Kyiv’s military administration, explained why raid alerts were announced several times in the Ukrainian capital.

“The enemy’s UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] were launched in many groups and attacked Kyiv in waves, from different directions, at the same time constantly changing the vectors of movement along the route,” he said, quoted by Reuters.

After a pause of 52 days, Moscow has resumed airstrikes on Kyiv. On Saturday, Ukrainian officials said all drones heading towards Kyiv were destroyed, but some hit infrastructure elsewhere in Ukraine.

Popko said on Sunday that according to preliminary information Ukraine’s air defence systems hit about 10 Iranian-made Shahed kamikaze drones in Kyiv and its outskirts.

Reuters could not independently verify the reports and there was no immediate comment from Russia.

Hello, this is the Guardian’s live coverage of the Russian war against Ukraine.

Russia launched several waves of drone attacks on Kyiv early on Sunday for the second night in row, stepping up its assaults on the Ukrainian capital after several weeks of pause, the city’s military administration said.

There were no initial reports of “critical damage” or casualties, said Serhiy Popko, the head of the Kyiv’s military administration, quoted by Reuters.

Here are some more developments:

• Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has sanctioned 37 Russian groups and 108 people including a former prime minister and a former education minister and said he aimed to fight wartime abductions of children from Ukraine and other “Russian terror”.

• Ukrainian officials said on Saturday that its armed forces shot down 29 of 38 drones in an overnight raid. More than 400 towns and villages in the south, south-east and north of the country were affected by the drone attacks, including an oil refinery that was hit in Odesa.

• Ukrainian troops are working to push back Russian forces positioned on the east bank of the Dnipro River, the military has said, a day after Ukraine claimed to have secured bridgeheads on that side of the river that divides the country’s partially occupied Kherson region.

• Ukraine’s armed forces claimed to have killed a further 620 Russian soldiers on Friday during operations. In response, Russia has said it had heavily bombed Ukrainian forces near the Dnipro River and killed about 75 soldiers.

• Two Ukrainian emergency workers were killed in the Zaporizhzhia region by Russian rocket attacks on Saturday. Ukrainian police said seven people were also injured when Russia fired a series of rocket strikes at the village of Komyshuvakha, close to the frontline in the Zaporizhzhia region, which Russia claimed to have annexed last year.

• In an intelligence briefing, the UK’s Ministry of Defence noted Russian forces were suffering “particularly heavy casualties” in fighting around Avdiivka, one of three areas seeing heavy ground fighting. Despite the heavy fighting, the MoD said neither side was making significant progress.

• Hungary must say no to the current Europe model built in Brussels, the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, told a congress of his Fidesz party on Saturday, as his government continues to object to Ukraine joining the EU.

• The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has called on the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, to take the first step towards a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Ukraine by withdrawing troops.

• More than 100 Russian doctors have signed a joint letter calling on Putin to release a woman jailed for a supermarket protest against the war in Ukraine. A St Petersburg court last week sentenced Alexandra Skochilenko, 33, to seven years in prison for spreading “false information” after she swapped supermarket price tags with slogans criticising Russia’s offensive in Ukraine.

• Ukraine has been the target of nearly 4,000 cyber-attacks since the invasion began, three times higher than before, according to Ukrainian officials who oversee cyber defences.