Ukraine war briefing: Rubio to meet Zelenskyy in Munich as Russian strikes leave thousands without power

The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has said he will have a chance to meet Volodymyr Zelenskyy at this week’s Munich Security Conference. A year after the vice-president, JD Vance, stunned assembled dignitaries with a verbal assault on many of the US’s closest allies in Europe, Rubio plans to take a less contentious but philosophically similar approach when he addresses the annual gathering on Saturday, US officials say. Before departing for Germany on Thursday evening, Rubio used reassuring words as he described Europe as important for Americans. “We’re very tightly linked together with Europe,” he told reporters. But he also made clear it wouldn’t be business as usual, saying: “We live in a new era in geopolitics, and it’s going to require all of us to reexamine what that looks like.” The Pentagon’s policy chief, Elbridge Colby, told European Nato defence ministers in Brussels that they needed to step up their combat capabilities and take the lead in protecting their continent from the Russian threat.

The war in Ukraine is on the Munich conference’s agenda, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron – who is making the trip to Germany – has said he hopes for a resumption of talks with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Macron said on Thursday he did not expect to speak with Putin in the coming days, and that European nations first needed to agree what they wanted from Russia. “It’s not a matter of days, there are preparations involved,” he told reporters after EU leaders’ talks.

Russia pounded Ukraine with ballistic missiles and drones overnight on Thursday, further battering its energy system and leaving tens of thousands in the capital, Kyiv, and the cities of Dnipro and Odesa without heat, power and water, officials said. In Kyiv alone, about 3,500 apartment buildings were without heating on Thursday after the latest winter attack on Ukraine’s power grid knocked out supplies to nearly 2,600 high-rises, on top of the 1,100 already affected by previous strikes, said mayor Vitali Klitschko. More than 100,000 families were without electricity, according to private energy firm DTEK.

Odesa was hit twice in less than 24 hours. Late on Thursday, the regional governor said a second wave of drone strikes had damaged houses, industrial sites and energy infrastructure and disrupted electricity, heating and water supplies. The attack also sparked a fire that engulfed one of the city’s markets, injuring one person, said the military administration. In the industrial south-eastern city of Dnipro, a combined missile and drone strike wounded four people, including a baby boy and a four-year-old girl, the regional governor said. In the north-eastern Kharkiv region bordering Russia, two people were killed and six more wounded in an attack on the railway hub of Lozova, prosecutors said.

Vladyslav Heraskevych has accused the International Olympic Committee of doing Russia’s propaganda for them after he was barred from racing in the Winter Games because he wanted to wear a “helmet of memory” in honour of Ukraine’s war dead, reports Sean Ingle. In one of the most controversial decisions in recent Olympic history, the 27-year-old Ukrainian skeleton racer was informed only minutes before he was due to compete that his accreditation had been rescinded. A wave of support for Heraskevych swept Ukraine over the ban, while Zelenskyy said the IOC’s decision played “into the hands of aggressors”.

Ukraine’s western allies have already pledged around $35bn in military aid to Kyiv this year, the British defence minister, John Healey, said on Thursday. The figure included new commitments by individual countries but also previous promises made by Ukraine’s allies, including €11.5bn ($13.6bn) already announced by Germany, a diplomat at Nato said. “We will step up military assistance to Ukraine,” Healey said after a meeting of Ukraine’s allies. “We will step up pressure on Russia.”

More than 220,000 people in Russia’s Belgorod region were left without electricity after a Ukrainian attack caused an accident at a substation, governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said on Thursday. “Emergency crews are working. Restoration will take at least 4 hours,” he wrote on Telegram.

Another group of Russian and Ukrainian children have been reunited with their families by the US first lady, Melania Trump, the White House said on Thursday, without specifying how many children were reunited or when it took place. It was the third time the first lady had brokered such a repatriation, it said.