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Russian gas producer Gazprom said on Saturday it had stopped sending gas to Latvia after accusing it of violating supply conditions, a move the Baltic country said would have little impact on its gas supplies, Reuters reported.
Russia has cut off gas supplies to Poland, Bulgaria, Finland, Netherlands and Denmark, which refused to pay for gas in line with an order by President Vladimir Putin requiring ruble accounts to be set up in a Russian bank.
Gazprom did not specify which gas supply conditions Latvia, a European Union and NATO military alliance member bordering Russia, had allegedly violated.
Edijs Saicans, deputy state secretary on energy policy at the Latvian Economy Ministry, said Gazprom's move would have little effect given that Latvia has decided to ban Russian gas imports from Jan. 1, 2023.
Russia has invited experts from the United Nations and the Red Cross to investigate the deaths of dozens of Ukrainian prisoners in a prison held by Moscow-backed separatists, the defense ministry said on Sunday.
In a statement, the ministry said it was acting "in the interests of conducting an objective investigation" into what it called an attack on the prison earlier in the week, according to Reuters.
The separatists put the death toll at 53 and accused Kyiv of hitting the prison with rockets. Ukraine's armed forces denied responsibility, saying Russian artillery had targeted the prison to hide the mistreatment of those held there.
More than 100 Russian soldiers were killed and seven tanks destroyed in fighting Friday in the south, Ukraine's military said Saturday, including in the Kherson region that is the focus of Kyiv's counteroffensive in the south and a key link in Moscow's supply lines, Reuters reported
Rail traffic to Kherson over the Dnipro River had been cut, the military's southern command said, potentially further isolating Russian forces west of the river from supplies in occupied Crimea and the east.
Ukraine has used Western-supplied long-range missile systems to badly damage three bridges across the Dnipro in recent weeks, cutting off Kherson city and — in the assessment of British defense officials — leaving Russia's 49th Army highly vulnerable on the river's west bank.
Reuters could not independently verify the battlefield reports.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has ordered the mandatory evacuation of people in the eastern Donetsk region, Reuters reported.
In a late-night television address on Saturday, Zelenskyy also said the hundreds of thousands of people still in combat zones in the larger Donbas region, which contains Donetsk as well as the neighboring Luhansk region, needed to leave.
"The more people leave (the) Donetsk region now, the fewer people the Russian army will have time to kill," he said. He said those who left would be given compensation.
Separately, domestic Ukrainian media outlets quoted Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk as saying the evacuation needed to take place before winter begins because the region's natural gas supplies had been destroyed.
Zelenskyy said hundreds of thousands of people were still living in areas of Donbas where fighting was fierce.
"Many refuse to leave but it still needs to be done," the president said. "If you have the opportunity, please talk to those who still remain in the combat zones in Donbas. Please convince them that it is necessary to leave."
Russia's Rosatom has awarded TSM Enerji the contract to undertake the remaining construction work at the $20 billion nuclear power plant it is building in Akkuyu in southern Turkey, the company said on Saturday, according to Reuters.
Akkuyu Nukleer, a Rosatom subsidiary that is building four reactors at the site on the Mediterranean, said it had signed the engineering, procurement and construction contract with TSM after terminating its agreement with Turkish firm IC Ictas.
TSM is owned by three Russia-based companies, according to the Turkish trade registry.
President Tayyip Erdogan has previously suggested that Turkey could work with Russia on the construction of two further plants.
Richard Moore, the chief of Britain's MI6 foreign intelligence agency, made a brief comment on social media on Saturday, above an earlier post on Twitter by Britain's defense ministry.
Ukrainian officials on Saturday denounced a call by Russia's embassy in Britain for fighters from the Azov regiment to face a "humiliating" execution, reports Agence France-Presse.