Russia-Ukraine war: more Ukrainian children to be returned from Russia – as it happened

Vladimir Putin will make a one-day trip to both the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia tomorrow, the Kremlin said.

The Russian president will hold talks focusing on bilateral relations, the war between Israel and Hamas and other international issues, the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said. Issues related to oil price caps will also be on the agenda, Peskov said. The Cop28 climate summit is taking place in Dubai in the UAE, but the Kremlin did not specify whether Putin would attend any related events.

Putin’s trip was first announced on Monday by his foreign affairs adviser, Yuri Ushakov, who didn’t give a date for the visits.

The international criminal court issued an arrest warrant for Putin in March for war crimes, accusing him of personal responsibility for the abductions of children from Ukraine.

Since the warrant was issued, Putin chose not to attend a BRICS summit in South Africa because the country would be obliged to arrest Putin upon arrival as it is a signatory to the international court’s treaty. Neither Saudi Arabia nor the UAE have signed the ICC’s founding treaty.

The Guardian’s Luke Harding reports from the Medyka border crossing between Ukraine and Poland, where Ukrainian lorry drivers are facing a protest blockade by their neighbours, who want the EU to reintroduce a permit scheme that limits the number of Ukrainian drivers able to operate in Poland.

On a snowy road next to Poland, Ukrainian lorry driver Vitaliy Zemyenko pondered the long journey ahead. It would take him nine hours to get through the Medyka border crossing. Over on the other side he would drop off a consignment of vodka. The problem was getting back.

“At the moment it’s taking a minimum of eight days to re-enter Ukraine,” he said. “That’s the best case scenario. Worst case is two weeks. This is a terrible situation”. The Poles, he added, wanted to stop Ukrainian drivers from operating in the European Union. “They don’t want us,” he said.

Russia’s Soviet-era Moskvich car brand entered the country’s list of top 10 bestselling cars for the first time in November, Reuters reports.

November sales of new passenger cars in Russia increased by 113% year-on-year to 109,706 vehicles, the Russian analytical agency Autostat said, citing data from its partner PPK. Sales are rebounding from a slump caused by sanctions and the departure of western carmakers in 2022.

Production of the Moskvich was relaunched this year at a plant in Moscow that was owned by French car manufacturer Renault. The Russian state bought the factory for a symbolic one rouble as the French carmaker left the market after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Moskvich 3 model is reportedly a rebranded Chinese JAC Sehol X4 assembled in Moscow using kits bought from its Chinese partner.

The Moskvich was ninth in the list of bestselling cars in November, having sold 1,910 for a 1.7% share of the market. Over the 11 months from January to November, 10,676 Moskvich cars were sold, the data showed.

Lada, Russia’s most popular car, led the way in November with 32,651 cars sold and a market share of 29.8%. Chinese cars hold most of the other positions on the list, replacing departing European and Japanese brands.

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At least two people were killed and one wounded after Russian forces struck the southern city of Kherson, the head of the office of the Ukrainian presidency said.

“Terrorists,” Andriy Yermak posted on Telegram along with two images of people lying on a pavement.

Regional prosecutors opened a war crimes investigation into one of the strikes, which occurred at about 9am and killed a 48-year-old man and a woman who had not yet been identified.

The mayor of Kherson, Roman Mrochko, said two doctors had been wounded in a separate artillery strike on a medical facility early on Tuesday.

The Guardian could not independently confirm the details.

Russian forces have regularly shelled Kherson since retreating from the regional capital late last year to the other side of the Dnipro River.

Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, will travel to Russia on Thursday along with a political and economic delegation, the Tasnim news agency reported on Tuesday.

Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amirabdollahian, is in Moscow today to attend a Caspian littoral states meeting. The Caspian littoral states comprise Iran, Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan.

Moscow and Tehran have boosted security, political and economic ties since the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022.

Nepal has asked Moscow not to recruit its citizens into the Russian army and immediately send back any Nepali soldiers back to the Himalayan nation, after revealing six soldiers serving Russia’s military had been killed, Reuters reports.

Nepali soldiers, called Gurkhas, are known for their bravery and fighting skills, and have served in the British and Indian armies following the independence of India in 1947 under an agreement between the three countries.

The small Himalayan country, wedged between China and India, has no such agreement with Russia. The Nepal government said in a statement that six of its nationals, who had been serving the Russian army, were killed, without providing any details.

“The government of Nepal has requested the Russian government to immediately return their bodies and pay compensation to their families,” the foreign ministry said late on Monday.

Diplomatic efforts were under way to get one Nepali citizen serving the Russian army and captured by Ukraine released, the statement added.

The English daily The Kathmandu Post, quoted Milan Raj Tuladhar, Nepal’s ambassador in Moscow, as saying that 150-200 Nepalis were working as mercenaries in the Russian army.

The Russian embassy in Kathmandu did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ukraine’s military shot down 10 out of 17 attack drones launched overnight by Russia, Ukrainian authorities said on Tuesday.

The governor of Ukraine’s western Lviv region, Maksym Kozytskyy, said three drones had struck an unspecified infrastructure target, causing a fire, but damage had been minimal and no casualties had been reported.

Kyiv’s air force said the drones were shot down over “various regions” of the country.

It said six S-300 missiles had been launched at civilian targets in the eastern Donetsk and southern Kherson regions.

Russian air defence systems destroyed or intercepted a total of 41 Ukraine-launched drones overnight and early morning on Tuesday, the Russian defence ministry has said.

Twenty-six of the drones were destroyed over Russian territory, and 15 were intercepted over the Sea of Azov and the Crimean peninsula, the ministry said in a statement on its Telegram channel.

The ministry did not say whether there was any damage caused by the attack or falling debris.

The Guardian could not immediately verify reports and there was no immediate comment from Ukraine.

Volodymyr Zelenskiy will address US senators by video on Tuesday during a classified briefing, as the Biden administration pushes Congress to approve new aid for Ukraine.

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said the administration had invited Zelenskiy to address the senators so they “could hear directly from him precisely what’s at stake.” They will also be hearing from the secretaries of defence, state and other top national security officials.

Zelenskiy’s appearance comes after the administration sent an urgent warning about the need to approve fresh military and economic assistance to Ukraine, saying Kyiv’s war effort to defend itself from Russia may grind to a halt without it.

In a letter to House and Senate leaders and released publicly on Monday, Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young warned the US will run out of funding to send weapons and assistance to Ukraine by the end of the year, saying that would “kneecap” Ukraine on the battlefield.

She added that the US already has run out of money that it has used to prop up Ukraine’s economy, and “if Ukraine’s economy collapses, they will not be able to keep fighting, full stop.”

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan went further, suggesting that voting against aid for Ukraine was effectively voting to make it easier for Russia to succeed.

“Congress has to decide whether to continue to support the fight for freedom in Ukraine … or whether Congress will ignore the lessons we’ve learned from history and let Putin prevail,” Sullivan told reporters at the White House.

Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s continuing coverage of the war in Ukraine.

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy will address a classified briefing of US senators on Tuesday, as the Biden administration urges Congress to approve the Biden administrations $106bn request for funds for the wars in Ukraine, Israel and other security needs.

On Monday, the White House issued a warning that US aid for Ukraine will run out by the end of the year if the new funding package isn’t agreed on – adding that Russian president Vladimir Putin could win the war in this event.

More on this shortly, first here’s a summary of the day’s other main events.

• President Joe Biden’s budget director, Shalanda Young, said in a blunt letter to Republican House speaker Mike Johnson that if military assistance dries up it would “kneecap” Kyiv’s fight against the Russian invasion. “Cutting off the flow of US weapons and equipment will kneecap Ukraine on the battlefield, not only putting at risk the gains Ukraine has made, but increasing the likelihood of Russian military victories,” she said.

• Speaker Johnson said the Biden administration had “failed to substantively address any of my conference’s legitimate concerns about the lack of a clear strategy in Ukraine”. Johnson also repeated the Republicans’ insistence on tying any Ukraine aid to changes in US policy on the southern border with Mexico, as the number of migrant arrivals rises.

• Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán demanded that a summit of EU leaders next week avoid any decision on Ukraine’s coveted goal of getting approval for membership talks. The European Commission recommended the bloc’s leaders give their approval to launch membership talks as soon as it meets final conditions but their unanimous agreement is needed.

• A Russian general died while deployed in Ukraine, the governor of Russia’s Voronezh region said, the latest high-ranking Russian military figure to die during the 21-month offensive. “Maj Gen Vladimir Zavadsky, deputy commander of the 14th Army Corps of the Northern Fleet, died in the line of duty in a special operation zone,” Voronezh governor Alexander Gusev said on Telegram, using the Russian term for its offensive in Ukraine.

• President Vladimir Putin said Russia should never repeat Soviet-era mass repressions, even as Moscow carries out an unprecedented crackdown on opponents of its Ukraine campaign. “It is important for us that nothing like this repeats itself in the history of our country,” Putin told his human rights council, according to Russian news agencies, referring to the mass repression seen under the Soviet Union.

• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, launched in February last year, accounts for about 150m tons of carbon dioxide emissions, a Ukrainian deputy minister cited experts as saying on Monday. “The war has a devastating impact on the environment. Air, soil and water is polluted as a result of the fighting,” Viktoria Kireyeva, Ukraine’s deputy minister of environmental protection and natural resources, said at a conference on the sidelines of the Cop28 climate conference in Dubai.

• Putin said he regretted deteriorating ties with western countries, as he accepted the credentials of two dozen new ambassadors at the Kremlin. “The times are not easy,” Putin told the envoys. Addressing the new ambassador of the UK, he said “In the postwar [second world war] period and until recently, our countries were able to build relations. But the current state of things … is well known and we should hope that the situation – in the interest of our countries and nations – will change for the better.”

• Ukraine said it had exported around 7m tons of cargo through the Black Sea despite Russia’s blockade – a more than fivefold increase in just over a month. “200 vessels exported 7m tons of cargo,” Ukraine’s reconstruction ministry said in a post on Telegram. The cargo included “almost 5m tons of Ukrainian agricultural products”.

• Poland has called on the EU to restore permits limiting transit for Ukrainian truckers, prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki said as Polish and Slovakian truckers blocked several border crossings to Ukraine. Polish drivers have been blocking the crossings since 6 November, demanding that the EU reinstate a system whereby Ukrainian companies need permits to operate in the bloc and the same for European truckers to enter Ukraine.

• Ukraine’s military said it had attacked oil depots in the Russia-controlled Ukrainian city of Luhansk on Sunday. Its forces carried out a “successful strike”, the Strategic Communications Department of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said on Telegram, without going into further detail.

• Russian forces are assaulting the industrial town of Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine from two new directions, Ukrainian officials said on Monday, as Moscow expanded its bid to capture the near-encircled town. Moscow has been trying for nearly two months to seize Avdiivka, an industrial town in the eastern Donetsk region that has become the fiercest flashpoint on the sprawling frontline.