US President Donald Trump says Russia's Vladimir Putin has agreed not to attack Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, and other cities and towns for a week due to extraordinary cold weather. Russia has not confirmed any such agreement, but Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky welcomed Trump's announcement and said he expected Russia to keep its promise. Trump did not specify when the pause would begin, but temperatures in the Ukrainian capital are due to plummet from Thursday night and reach -24C (-11F) in the next few days. Russia has intensified attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure during the bitter winter, as it has during cold periods since the full-scale invasion began in 2022. Speaking at a televised cabinet meeting in Washington DC, the US president said: I personally asked President Putin not to fire into Kyiv and the various towns for a week, and he agreed to do that.

The Ukrainian city of Chernihiv is in total blackout following what the authorities describe as a massive assault by Russian missiles and drones, with hundreds of thousands of people affected. Across the wider Chernihiv region, four people are reported to have been killed as residential neighbourhoods were struck in the town of Novhorod-Siverskyi. Ten others were injured, including a 10-year-old girl. The country's most northerly region is the latest to be hit in an intensifying series of attacks on civilian infrastructure as Russia targets energy supplies, the rail network, homes and businesses in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. I personally heard the drones flying overhead, 55-year-old Oleksandr Babich said.

In the three months before August last year, Russia fired a total of 1,100, according to a report by Ukraine's general staff. A steep rise followed, with 818 drones recorded in August, 1,410 in September and more than 2,000 in October. But the numbers just keep going up. In May, for the first time, the number of drones exceeded 4,000. This month is likely to set a new record.

Overnight, air sirens were heard sounding in several other Ukrainian regions, including the capital Kyiv. It was not immediately clear whether there were any casualties. The Russian military has not commented on the issue. In his video address late on Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky again accused Russia of targeting Ukrainian energy infrastructure - in violation of a temporary moratorium agreed earlier this month in talks involving the US. Moscow has also repeatedly blamed Ukraine for attacking Russia's energy sector. Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this week suggested that Ukraine should temporarily be placed under UN control to elect what he called a more "competent" government.

A senior Ukrainian official has accused Elon Musk of "committing evil" after a new biography revealed details about how the business magnate ordered his Starlink satellite communications network to be turned off near the Crimean coast last year to hobble a Ukrainian drone attack on Russian warships. In a statement on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which Musk owns, the Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak wrote that Musk's interference led to the deaths of civilians, calling them "the price of a cocktail of ignorance and big ego". "By not allowing Ukrainian drones to destroy part of the Russian fleet via Starlink interference, @elonmusk allowed this fleet to fire Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian cities. As a result, civilians, and children are being killed," Podolyak wrote. "Why do some people so desperately want to defend war criminals and their desire to commit murder? And do they now realise that they are committing evil and encouraging evil?" Sometimes a mistake is much more than just a mistake.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak has slammed Elon Musk for indirectly allowing Russian forces to attack Ukrainian cities after it was revealed his Starlink satellite communications interfered with a drone operation. Details of the incident are laid out in a biography of Musk by Walter Isaacson, due out on Tuesday. The book describes how the network turned off communications near the coast of the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula as Ukrainian drones were approaching Russian warships, resulting in "lost connectivity". Musk allegedly ordered Starlink engineers to turn off the communications as he feared Russian President Vladimir Putin would respond with nuclear weapons to a Ukrainian attack on Crimea, according to Isaacson's book. "I think if the Ukrainian attacks had succeeded in sinking the Russian fleet, it would have been like a mini Pearl Harbor and led to a major escalation," Musk is quoted as saying.

Russian attacks have turned the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut into "burnt ruins", President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said, while Ukraine's military has reported missile, rocket and drone attacks in multiple parts of the country that have killed civilians and destroyed critical infrastructure. Zelenskyy said on Saturday that the situation "remains very difficult" in several front-line cities in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. For a long time, there is no living place left on the land of these areas that have not been damaged by shells and fire," Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address, naming cities that have again found themselves under sustained Russian barrages. "The occupiers actually destroyed Bakhmut, another Donbas city that the Russian army turned into burnt ruins," he said. Zelenskyy also said that more than 1.5 million people were without power in the southern Ukrainian city of Odesa after a night attack by drones.