Head of Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant released; Kremlin unclear on which parts of Ukraine it is annexing – as it happened

It’s 9pm in Kyiv. Here’s where we stand:

• Russia no longer has full control of any of the four provinces of Ukraine it says it annexed last week. The Russian military has acknowledged that Kyiv’s forces had broken through in the Kherson region. It said the Ukrainian army and its “superior tank units” had managed to “penetrate the depths of our defence” around the villages of Zoltaya Balka and Alexsandrovka.

• Ukraine has “fully cleared” Russian forces from the key eastern city of Lyman, its president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, confirmed, a day after Moscow admitted its troops had pulled out after they were encircled. Lyman’s recapture by Ukrainian troops is Russia’s largest battlefield loss since Ukraine’s lightning counteroffensive in the north-eastern Kharkiv region in September.

• Russias’s ministry of defence spokesperson, Igor Konashenkov, said Russian troops had occupied what he called a “pre-prepared defensive line”. His comments are an admission that Ukraine’s southern counter-offensive is dramatically gaining pace, two months after it began. Ukrainian brigades appear to have achieved their biggest breakthrough in the region since the war started, bursting through the frontline and advancing rapidly along the Dnieper River.

• President Zelenskiy said Ukraine is not just experiencing military success in Lyman, but also in Kherson. In his overnight statement, he said Ukraine forces have liberated the small Arkhanhelske and Myrolyubivka settlements in the Kherson region. Vladimir Saldo, the head of the Russian-imposed authority in the region, admitted that Ukrainians had gained some ground.

• Ukraine’s military has said its forces recaptured the village of Torske near Lyman in the Donetsk region on Sunday. Russian forces who have been forced to retreat towards Luhansk’s city of Kreminna are being hit “with fire” by Ukrainian missile units, artillery and air forces, according to Serhii Cherevatyi, a spokesperson for the eastern group of Ukraine’s armed forces.
  

• The Kremlin is still determining which areas of occupied Ukraine it has “annexed”, Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson has said. Putin has vowed to protect Russia’s newly claimed territories using “all means at its disposal”, indicating a potential nuclear strike. The lack of a clear red line may undermine his attempts at using nuclear deterrence to halt Ukraine’s successful counteroffensive and western support for Kyiv.

• The lower house of Russia’s parliament, the state Duma, has approved laws on annexing four Ukrainian territories into Russia. No lawmakers in the lower house voted against the bill to incorporate the Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk and Luhansk regions into Russia. Lawmakers in the upper house, Russia’s federation council, are expected to formalise the illegal annexation on Tuesday.

• The Kremlin also said Russia favours a “balanced approach” to the issue of nuclear weapons that is not based on emotion. The remarks by Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov come after Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-appointed leader of the Chechnya region, said Moscow should consider using a “low-yield” nuclear weapon in Ukraine.

• The head of the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine has been released, according to the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi. Ihor Murashov was detained on Friday by a Russian patrol as he travelled from the Zaporizhzhia plant to the town of Enerhodar, according to the state-owned company in charge of the plant.

• Russia has sacked the commander of its western military district, Col Gen Alexander Zhuravlyov, according to news outlet RBC. The reported departure of Zhuravlyov, who led one of the five military districts that make up Russia’s armed forces, is the latest in a series of top officials to be fired after a series of defeats and humiliations in the war in Ukraine.

• Thousands of people called up to fight in Ukraine from a far-eastern Russian region have been sent home due to wrongful mobilisation, according to a local official. In the Khabarovsk region, about 8,500km (5,300 miles) east of Moscow, the governor, Mikhail Degtyaryov, said an enlistment officer had been suspended for the wrongful mobilisation.

• The Chechen leader and Vladimir Putin ally, Ramzan Kadyrov, has said that his three underage sons are heading to fight in Ukraine. Kadyrov said “the time has come” for his sons, 14, 15 and 16 years old, “to show themselves in a real battle” and that they will “soon go to the frontline”.

• Russia has put Marina Ovsyannikova, the former state TV editor who interrupted a news broadcast to protest against the Ukraine war, on a wanted list after she reportedly escaped house arrest. The Ukrainian-born Ovsyannikova, 44, gained international attention in March after bursting into a studio of Channel One, her then employer, to denounce the Ukraine war during a live news bulletin, holding a poster reading “no war”.

• The EU has summoned Russia’s top diplomat in Brussels in protest of President Vladimir Putin’s “illegal annexation” of four Ukrainian territories. The move is part of a coordinated exercise with EU member states, Peter Stano, a foreign affairs spokesperson for the bloc, said.

• Ukraine is offering the US full visibility into its list of intended Russian targets in the hopes of receiving a new set of powerful, long-range rocket systems, according to Ukrainian officials. The move essentially gives the US veto power over Ukrainian targeting of Russia and is intended to convince the Biden administration that Ukraine would not use these new weapons to strike inside Russian territory.

• A record 83% of Ukrainians would like their country to join the Nato military alliance, according to a new poll. Only 4% said they would vote against joining Nato and 9% said they would not vote.

That’s it from me, Léonie Chao-Fong, and the Russia-Ukraine war blog today. Thank you for following. I’ll be back tomorrow.

3 Oct 202213.41 EDT

Julian Borger

An independent Polish military analyst has raised alarms by identifying a train apparently moving through central Russia laden with trucks, as belonging to the 12th main directorate of the Russian armed forces, which is involved in the storage, transport, maintenance and issuance of nuclear weapons.

The claim comes at a time when Vladimir Putin and his top officials have been signalling that Russia will use all forces at its disposal to defend Russian territory, which the Kremlin, but almost no one else, now defines as including much of eastern Ukraine.

The analyst, Konrad Muzyka, said in a Twitter thread that the movement of the train does not necessarily mean preparations are being made for nuclear use. He said it could just be more signalling, or it could be training or regular wargaming.

Muzyka does not make clear what it was about the train or the trucks that led him to identify them as coming from 12th main directorate, and has not yet replied to a query about it. Image analysts at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey studied the short film that Muzyka retweeted as his source, and could not find identifying details.

“Yes, the 12th main directorate has such trucks, but so does every other military unit,” Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear expert at the institute, said. “I can see nothing that would lead me to think those trucks are 12th directorate as opposed to something else.”

Ukraine’s presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak has mocked Elon Musk for suggesting that Kyiv should accept Russia’s annexation of Crimea in return for an end to the war.

Musk proposed his recipe for peace between Russia and Ukraine on Twitter, accompanied by a poll:

Podolyak tweeted in response:

A record 83% of Ukrainians would like their country to join the Nato military alliance, according to a new poll.

The poll, conducted by the Kyiv-based opinion pollster Rating Group, surveyed 2,000 Ukrainians after the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, announced that Ukraine was submitting an expedited application for Nato membership.

The percentage of those supporting Nato membership was the highest ever recorded by a survey in Ukraine, the pollster said.

Only 4% said they would vote against joining Nato and 9% said they would not vote.

From the Kyiv Independent’s Illia Ponomarenko:

A Czech crowdfunding campaign has raised more than £1.2m to buy a modernised tank for the Ukrainian army to help it defend against Russia’s invasion.

The campaign, dubbed “a gift for Putin”, received donations from 11,288 individual donors and was backed by the Czech defence ministry and Ukraine’s embassy in Prague.

The Czech Republic has become the first country where ordinary people bought a tank for Ukrainian troops, said the Ukrainian deputy foreign minister, Yevhen Perebyinis, on Twitter.

The modernised Soviet-era T-72 tank, named Tomas, will be sent to Ukraine.

3 Oct 202212.06 EDT

Pjotr Sauer

Russia has put Marina Ovsyannikova, the former state TV editor who interrupted a news broadcast to protest against the Ukraine war, on a wanted list after she reportedly escaped house arrest.

The Ukrainian-born Ovsyannikova, 44, gained international attention in March after bursting into a studio of Channel One, her then employer, to denounce the Ukraine war during a live news bulletin, holding a poster reading “no war”. At the time she was fined 30,000 roubles (£460) for shunning protest laws.

View image in fullscreen

Ovsyannikova continued protesting against the war and was charged in August with spreading false information about the Russian army for holding up a poster that read “Putin is a murderer, his soldiers are fascists” during a solo protest on the Moskva River embankment opposite the Kremlin. She was subsequently placed under house arrest to await trial and was facing up to 10 years in prison if found guilty.

On Saturday, Ovsyannikova’s ex-husband said she had escaped house arrest together with her young daughter.

“Last night, my ex-wife left the place that the court assigned her, and disappeared with my 11-year-old daughter in an unknown direction,” Igor Ovsyannikov, who is employed at the state-run news outlet RT, said.

Ovsyannikova’s whereabouts are unknown and she did not immediately respond to a request for comment. On Monday, she was added to the interior ministry’s online list of fugitives, accompanied by a photograph.

Read the full story here:

The head of the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine has been released, according to the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi.

Ihor Murashov, the director general of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, has returned to his family safely, Grossi wrote on Twitter.

Murashov was detained on Friday by a Russian patrol as he travelled from the Zaporizhzhia plant to the town of Enerhodar, where many of the plant’s staff live, according to the state-owned company in charge of the plant.

The head of Energoatom, Petro Kotin, said in a statement:

He was taken out of the car, and with his eyes blindfolded he was driven in an unknown direction,

The IAEA later confirmed it had been in contact with “the relevant authorities” without mentioning Russia by name and said it had been informed that Murashov was in “temporary detention”.

Murashov’s detention “has an immediate and serious impact on decision-making in ensuring the safety and security of the plant”, the UN nuclear watchdog said on Saturday.

Three Russian men who were called up to fight in the war in Ukraine have died at an army training centre in Poroshino in Russia’s Yekaterinburg region, according to Novaya Gazeta.

The Russian state Duma lawmaker, Maxim Ivanov, was cited by a local news outlet as saying:

Yes, I confirm that three people have died. One of the mobilised men died from a heart attack, another one committed suicide. The third one was discharged and sent home, where he died from cirrhosis of the liver.

Another news outlet earlier reported the suicide of a 46-year-old from the Kurgan region, whose body was reportedly found in the canteen of the Poroshino army training centre.

Russia no longer has full control of any of the four provinces of Ukraine it says it annexed last week after Ukrainian troops reportedly advanced dozens of kilometres in Kherson province in the south of the country and made additional gains in the east.

On Monday, the Russian military acknowledged that Kyiv’s forces had broken through in the Kherson region. It said the Ukrainian army and its “superior tank units” had managed to “penetrate the depths of our defence” around the villages of Zoltaya Balka and Alexsandrovka.

The ministry of defence spokesperson Igor Konashenkov said Russian troops had occupied what he called a “pre-prepared defensive line”. They continued to “inflict massive fire damage” on Ukrainian forces, he claimed.

His comments are an admission that Ukraine’s southern counter-offensive is dramatically gaining pace, two months after it began. Ukrainian brigades appear to have achieved their biggest breakthrough in the region since the war started, bursting through the frontline and advancing rapidly along the Dnieper River.

Kyiv gave no official confirmation of the gains. Russian sources acknowledged that the Ukrainian tank offensive had moved along the river’s west bank, recapturing a number of villages along the way, and threatening the supply lines for thousands of marooned Russian troops.

Read the full report by my colleagues Luke Harding, Isobel Koshiw and Peter Beaumont:

Russia has sacked the commander of its western military district, Col Gen Alexander Zhuravlyov, according to news outlet RBC.

The reported departure of Zhuravlyov, who led one of the five military districts that make up Russia’s armed forces, is the latest in a series of top officials to be fired after a series of defeats and humiliations in the war in Ukraine.

It comes after dramatic Russian losses in north-east Ukraine in September and the recapture by Ukraine on Saturday of the key eastern city of Lyman.

Zhuravlyov will be replaced by Lieut Gen Roman Berdnikov, RBC reported. There was no official confirmation of the change.

It’s 6pm in Kyiv. Here’s where we stand:

• Ukraine has “fully cleared” Russian forces from the key eastern city of Lyman, its president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has confirmed, a day after Moscow admitted its troops had pulled out after they were encircled. Lyman’s recapture by Ukrainian troops is Russia’s largest battlefield loss since Ukraine’s lightning counteroffensive in the north-eastern Kharkiv region in September.

• President Zelenskiy said Ukraine is not just experiencing military success in Lyman, but also in Kherson. In his overnight statement, he said Ukraine forces have liberated the small Arkhanhelske and Myrolyubivka settlements in the Kherson region. Vladimir Saldo, the head of the Russian-imposed authority in the region, admitted that Ukrainians had gained some ground.

• Ukraine’s military has said its forces recaptured the village of Torske near Lyman in the Donetsk region on Sunday. Russian forces who have been forced to retreat towards Luhansk’s city of Kreminna are being hit “with fire” by Ukrainian missile units, artillery and air forces, according to Serhii Cherevatyi, a spokesperson for the eastern group of Ukraine’s armed forces.
  

• The Kremlin is still determining which areas of occupied Ukraine it has “annexed”, Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson has said. Putin has vowed to protect Russia’s newly claimed territories using “all means at its disposal”, indicating a potential nuclear strike. The lack of a clear red line may undermine his attempts at using nuclear deterrence to halt Ukraine’s successful counteroffensive and western support for Kyiv.

• The lower house of Russia’s parliament, the state Duma, has approved laws on annexing four Ukrainian territories into Russia. No lawmakers in the lower house voted against the bill to incorporate the Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk and Luhansk regions into Russia. Lawmakers in the upper house, Russia’s federation council, are expected to formalise the illegal annexation on Tuesday.

• The Kremlin also said Russia favours a “balanced approach” to the issue of nuclear weapons that is not based on emotion. The remarks by Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov come after Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-appointed leader of the Chechnya region, said Moscow should consider using a “low-yield” nuclear weapon in Ukraine.

• Thousands of people called up to fight in Ukraine from a far-eastern Russian region have been sent home due to wrongful mobilisation, according to a local official. In the Khabarovsk region, about 8,500km (5,300 miles) east of Moscow, the governor, Mikhail Degtyaryov, said an enlistment officer had been suspended for the wrongful mobilisation.

• The Chechen leader and Vladimir Putin ally, Ramzan Kadyrov, has said that his three underage sons are heading to fight in Ukraine. Kadyrov said “the time has come” for his sons, 14, 15 and 16 years old, “to show themselves in a real battle” and that they will “soon go to the frontline”.

• The Czech Republic has repeated a warning to its citizens to leave Russia amid a worsening security situation, its foreign ministry said. The call mirrors similar recent recommendations by other European countries in the region including Poland, Romania and Bulgaria.
  
  

• The EU has summoned Russia’s top diplomat in Brussels in protest of President Vladimir Putin’s “illegal annexation” of four Ukrainian territories. The move is part of a coordinated exercise with EU member states, Peter Stano, a foreign affairs spokesperson for the bloc, said.

• Ukraine is offering the US full visibility into its list of intended Russian targets in the hopes of receiving a new set of powerful, long-range rocket systems, according to Ukrainian officials. The move essentially gives the US veto power over Ukrainian targeting of Russia and is intended to convince the Biden administration that Ukraine would not use these new weapons to strike inside Russian territory.

• Sweden’s coastguard has said it can no longer see any leaks from the Nord Stream 1 pipeline in the Baltic Sea. A smaller leak from the Nord Stream 2 was still visible during observations during an overflight on Monday morning, the coastguard said in a statement. Meanwhile, the Russian gas company Gazprom said gas had stopped leaking from three ruptured Nord Stream gas lines under the Baltic.

Hello everyone, it’s Léonie Chao-Fong still here to bring you all the latest from Ukraine. Feel free to get in touch on Twitter or via email.