Ukraine-Russia war – live: Russian soldiers’ ‘low morale over high casualties and poor leadership’

Russia launched a wave of missile attacks on Friday, with strikes in at least four cities, including Kyiv, triggering power outages across the country.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has used the final of the football World Cup to decry war.

“This World Cup proved time and again that different countries and different nationalities can decide who is the strongest in fair play but not in the playing with fire — on the green playing field, not on the red battlefield,” Mr Zelensky said in an English video statement released hours before the final in Qatar between Argentina and France.

Russian military forces have shelled the centre of Kherson, the major city that Russian soldiers retreated from last month in one of Moscow’s biggest battlefield setbacks in Ukraine.

Three people were wounded in Sunday’s attacks, said presidential deputy chief of staff Kyrylo Tymoshenko.The southern city and its surrounding region have come under frequent attack since the Russian pullback.

Regional governor Yaroslav Yanushevych said that Russia had carried out 54 attacks with rocket, mortar and tank fire over the previous day, killing three people and wounding six.

One person was killed and four people were wounded by shelling in the southern Russian region of Belgorod near the border with Ukraine on Sunday, the governor of the region said.

“Our air defence system was activated over Belgorod and the Belgorod region,” governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said.

“Four people are known to have been injured. Medical teams are taking them to hospital,” he said.

A poultry plant has been damaged and windows in several residential buildings and cars have been hit, he added.

Three witnesses told Reuters that loud blasts were heard in the city on Sunday.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Saturday inaugurated Germany‘s first liquefied natural gas terminal, declaring that the speed with which it was put into service is a signal that Europe‘s biggest economy will remain strong.

The top three officials in the government — Scholz, Economy Minister Robert Habeck and Finance Minister Christian Lindner — attended the inauguration in the North Sea port of Wilhelmshaven in a sign of the importance that Germany attaches to several new LNG terminals that it is scrambling to build following Russia‘s invasion of Ukraine.

The terminals are part of a drive to prevent an energy crunch that also includes temporarily reactivating old oil- and coal-fired power stations and extending the life of Germany’s last three nuclear power plants, which were supposed to be switched off at the end of this year, until mid-April.

People use flashlights to navigate blackout-shrouded Kyiv following Russian strikes on the power infrastructure in the Ukrainian capital.

The West is right to give Zelensky a blank cheque to defend his land, because the cost of a new Russian domination of Eastern Europe would inevitably be far greater

Read our latest editorial on Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine:

The time is approaching for a negotiated peace in Ukraine to reduce the risk of another devastating world war, but dreams of breaking up Russia could unleash nuclear chaos, veteran US diplomat Henry Kissinger said.

Mr Kissinger, an architect of the Cold War policy of detente towards the Soviet Union as secretary of state under Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, has met Vladimir Putin multiple times since he first became president in 2000.

“The time is approaching to build on the strategic changes which have already been accomplished and to integrate them into a new structure towards achieving peace through negotiation,” Kissinger wrote in The Spectator.

“A peace process should link Ukraine to Nato, however expressed. The alternative of neutrality is no longer meaningful,” Kissinger wrote in an article entitled “How to avoid another world war”.

Russia’s defense ministry has announced that the country’s regiment with the hypersonic “Avangard” missile system will be introduced into service.

President Vladimir Putin claimed in 2018 that the intercontinental missile was “invincible” and that the weapon can hit any target on Earth in 30 minutes and at 27 times the speed of sound.

“Another missile regiment will be introduced into service in the Yasny military formation for the anniversary of our Strategic Missile Forces – now with the Avangard missile system,” Russian Strategic Missile Forces commander Sergey Karakayev said last week, according to the News Agency TASS.

Vishwam Sankaran reports: