Ukraine war live: Biden trying to escalate situation ‘to the maximum’ with missile decision, Russian lawmaker says

Overnight Ukraine’s air force has claimed it shot down eight of 11 drones launched at the country by Russia, Reuters reports.

Citing a message on the Telegram app, the news agency reports that Ukraine’s air force said it lost three of the drones on its radar, and that Russia also launched three missiles into Ukraine. Two fo the missiles were aimed at Ukraine’s Sumy region.

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

Russian lawmaker Maria Butina has said that the administration of President Joe Biden was risking a third world war if it allowed Ukraine to use US-made weapons to strike deep into Russia.

“These guys, Biden’s administration, is trying to escalate the situation to the maximum while they still have power and are still in office,” said Butina, who was jailed in the US for 18 months in 2019 after she tried to infiltrate US conservative groups and the National Rifle Association to promote Russian political interests around the 2016 election. She is now a lawmaker for the ruling United Russia party.

“I have a great hope that [Donald] Trump will overcome this decision if this has been made because they are seriously risking the start of World War Three which is not in anybody’s interest,” she told Reuters.

Biden on Sunday reversed a ban on the firing of long-range US missiles into Russian territory by permitting them to be used against Russian and North Korean forces in the Kursk region. The US president will allow Ukraine to use US-made Atacms rockets, which have a range of 190 miles (300km) .

President Vladimir Putin said on 12 September that western approval for such a step would mean “the direct involvement of Nato countries, the United States and European countries in the war in Ukraine” because Nato military infrastructure and personnel would have to be involved in the targeting and firing of the missiles.

In late October, Putin said that Russia’s defence ministry was working on different ways to respond if the United States and its Nato allies help Ukraine to strike deep into Russia with long-range Western missiles.

“I guess there are some people in the United States who have nothing to lose for whatever reason or who are completely off the grid so much that they simply do not care,” said Butina.

In other developments:

• Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, appeared to confirm the news of the US policy reversal, though he said any proof about the change in policy would emerge on the battlefield, if and when the missiles are used. “Today, there’s a lot of talk in the media about us receiving permission for respective actions. But strikes are not carried out with words. Such things are not announced. Missiles will speak for themselves. They certainly will,” Zelenskyy said.

• Ten people, including two children, were killed and 52 have been injured after when a Russian missile hit a residential nine-storey building in Ukraine’s northeastern region of Sumy, Ukraine’s emergency services and military have said. “Sunday evening for the city of Sumy became hell, a tragedy that Russia brought to our land,” Volodymyr Artyukh, the head of the Sumy military administration said in a post on the administration’s Telegram messaging channel.

• Russia pounded Ukraine’s power grid into the early hours of Sunday in what Kyiv said was a “massive” attack with 120 missiles and 90 drones that killed at least seven people. The attack was the largest missile and drone assault on Ukraine since August and the first big Russian assault since the US election, showing the Kremlin in little mood to compromise after Donald Trump’s victory.

• Ukrenergo, Ukraine’s principal energy supplier, said blackouts and consumption restrictions would be introduced “in all regions” from Monday as engineers tried to repair as much of the damage to power facilities as possible. With the harsh Ukrainian winter fast approaching, the country is already suffering from major energy shortfalls.

• Polish prime minister Donald Tusk said the attack showed that talking to Russian President Vladimir Putin on the phone would not stop the war in Ukraine, two days after German Chancellor Olaf Scholz rang him. “No one will stop Putin with phone calls. The attack last night, one of the biggest in this war, has proved that telephone diplomacy cannot replace real support from the whole west for Ukraine,” Donald Tusk wrote on X.

• Scholz defended his decision to phone the Kremlin, telling reporters on Sunday it was important to tell him [Putin] that he cannot count on support from Germany, Europe and many others in the world waning”. He added: “The conversation was very detailed but contributed to a recognition that little has changed in the Russian president’s views of the war – and that’s not good news.”

• Ukraine will be “top of the agenda” this week at a meeting of leaders from the world’s most powerful economies, Keir Starmer pledged, though he said he had “no plans” to follow Scholz and speak directly to Putin. Starmer will meet world leaders on Monday at the G20 summit in Brazil, which the Russian president has declined to attend, sending his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in his place.

• Finland is hosting its first large-scale Nato artillery exercise since the Nordic nation joined the military alliance last year, with live fire drills starting on Sunday. The exercise conducted in the northern Lapland region in November is part of Dynamic Front 25, the largest Nato artillery exercise ever held in Europe, with fire drills in Finland as well as Estonia, Germany, Romania and Poland. The Nordic nation, which shares a border with Russia, joined Nato last year, dropping decades of military non-alignment after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

• About 1,500 supporters of Russia’s exiled opposition marched through central Berlin on Sunday – led by Yulia Navalnaya and chanting “No to war!” and “No to Putin” – in a demonstration against Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. The march saw a smaller turnout than expected and was seen as a credibility test for the movement – weakened by years of repression and thrown into disarray since the death of its main leader Alexei Navalny in prison earlier this year.

• Russia’s air defence units destroyed a drone heading towards Moscow, mayor Sergei Sobyanin said early on Monday. “According to preliminary information, there is no damage or casualties at the site of the fall of the debris,” Sobyanin wrote on his Telegram messaging channel.