Russia-Ukraine war live

Russia-Ukraine war live: Russian booby traps turning Kherson into ‘city of death’, says Ukraine official

The EU has said it will not recognise Russian passports issued in regions of Ukraine annexed by Moscow.

The move – which also covers two Kremlin-controlled areas of Georgia – means Russian travel documents given to residents of those regions cannot be used to get visas or to enter the Schengen zone, according to Reuters.

“This decision is a response to Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified military aggression against Ukraine and Russia’s practice of issuing Russian international passports to residents of the occupied regions,” he European Councilt said in a statement.

The move still needs to be formally signed off by the European parliament and EU member states.

In September, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, laid claim to four regions of Ukraine in a unilateral declaration widely rejected by the international community. Moscow also annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in 2014.

Jonathan Landay is in a village near the frontline in Kherson for Reuters, the precise location of which cannot be disclosed due to Ukrainian military rules. There he spoke to 85-year-old Nadiia Nizarenko, who said last night was “the first night it’s been quiet, it’s like there was no war”.

Her 63-year-old daughter, Svitlana Lischeniuk, who retired last year as the local school director, was suspicious of what would come next, telling the reporter: “[The Russians] can prepare a trap for our army. We will get Kherson back, but what is very important is that our soldiers don’t suffer.”

The family has lived on humanitarian aid, pickled vegetables grown over the summer, water from a nearby well and occasional grocery runs to the town of Bashtanka. They also have a portable generator and a wood-burning stove.

“We have wood, so we have heat,” Lischeniuk said. “We will be able to survive and I’m sure we can get through the winter.”

The school where she worked has been reduced to rubble. Lischeniuk said she had left this summer but returned to help guard her neighbour’s properties and extinguish fires that she said the Russians deliberately set to destroy the wheat in surrounding fields.

“I am here on a mission,” she declared. “My place is here.”

Ukrainian troops capture town on key route towards Kherson

Ukrainian forces have taken the town of Snihurivka on a key route on the approach to Kherson, as Russia said on Thursday it had begun its retreat from the southern city, which was announced in Moscow a day earlier.

“The Russian troop units are manoeuvring to a prepared position on the left bank of the Dnipro River in strict accordance with the approved plan,” the Russian defence ministry said.

Ukraine’s army chief, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, said Kyiv could not yet confirm whether Russia was indeed pulling out of the city, but that Ukrainian troops had advanced 7km (four miles) in the past 24 hours and recaptured 12 settlements.

However, eyewitness reports said Russian forces were still visible in Kherson, with Ukrainian troops continuing their advance from three directions from the north, east and west, as the large pocket around the city once held by Russian forces appeared to be shrinking.

While the push towards Kherson is getting most of the attention, fighting is still taking place in the occupied Donetsk region in east Ukraine.

Agence France Presse (AFP) also had a reporter in Bakhmut, 85km north of Donetsk city, as people banded together to survive.

In a supermarket car park in Bakhmut, the eastern Ukrainian city at the centre of the fighting for the Donbas region, Anatoliy is rushing to load up his truck with coal for him and his neighbours, determined to stay dug in for the winter.

Around half of Bakhmut’s 70,000 people have stayed on despite the fighting raging for the past four months, mostly in the east of the city.

“The fact that we are still here and helping others, that means a lot to us,” says Anatoliy, a 60-year-old man with a white beard and a beanie.

“We aren’t just going to stay here and do nothing. We cannot survive on our own,” Anatoliy adds, still shovelling.

Locals are allowed to pick up two tons of coal per household in a city with no electricity or running water since mid-October.

But the sound of endless explosions of shelling between Ukrainian forces defending the city and Russian troops boosted by Wagner mercenaries can be heard overhead.

When Russia invaded in February “we still had emotions, but now, we are just surviving”, Anatoliy says.

“We are giving humanitarian aid. I have a house, I have bees, and anything I can harvest in my garden, I give it to people for free,” he says.

“If someone needs carrots, cabbages or beetroots, they can take it ... I don’t need much, so long as it can help people survive,” Anatoliy says.

“These days, we think about others more than we used to.”