Russia a threat to Europe

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has plunged Europe into an era of insecurity, Germany said yesterday, a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin predicted a "dangerous" decade ahead.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who is from a wing of Germany's Social Democrats that long argued for closer economic ties to Moscow, said the February 24 invasion had ruptured those hopes.

"When we look at the Russia of today, there is no room for old dreams," Steinmeier said, referring to former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev's dream of a "common European home".

"It has also plunged us in Germany into another time, into an insecurity we thought we had overcome: a time marked by war, violence and flight, by concerns about the expansion of war into a wildfire in Europe," he said. "Harder years, rough years are coming."

Germany, which has joined European sanctions against Russia and weapons deliveries to Ukraine, has recorded the arrival of more than a million Ukrainian refugees and warned of possible energy shortages this winter after cuts in Russian gas supplies.

President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday stood outside in the dark beside the wreckage of a downed drone and vowed that widespread Russian attacks on power plants would not break Ukrainian spirits.

"Shelling will not break us - to hear the enemy's anthem on our land is scarier than the enemy's rockets in our sky. We are not afraid of the dark," he said, adding that Russia had so far launched more than 8,000 air strikes and fired 4,500 missiles.

A senior official said that Kyiv and four regions might have to cut electricity supplies for longer than planned after Russian attacks.

Meanwhile, the head of Moscow-annexed Crimea has said civilian departures from occupied Kherson organised by Russia's forces amid a Ukrainian counter-offensive were "completed", after he visited the region with the Kremlin's domestic chief Sergei Kiriyenko.

Moscow-installed authorities in the southern Ukrainian region have urged residents to cross to the left bank of the Dnipro River as Ukrainian forces make gains in the south.

Ukraine has accused Moscow of forcibly removing some people and recruiting others to fight against their will. Its general staff said what it called Russia's so-called evacuation was continuing, with hospital and business equipment removed and extra Russian forces deployed in empty homes.

In Luhansk, Russian forces have tried to break through defences in Bilohorivka but were beaten back, regional governor Serhiy Gaidai told Ukrainian television.

Fighting has been going on in the Donbas since 2014 between the Ukrainian military and Russian-backed separatists, reports Reuters.

Putin and other officials have repeatedly said Russia could use "all available means" to protect its territorial integrity, remarks interpreted in the West as implicit threats to use nuclear arms in fighting over parts of Ukraine that Russia says it has annexed.

Putin played down a nuclear standoff with the West, insisting Russia had not threatened to use nuclear weapons but had only responded to nuclear "blackmail" from Western leaders.

US President Joe Biden expressed scepticism, asking in an interview with NewsNation: "If he has no intention, why does he keep talking about it?"