Russian forces have been gaining ground in parts of east Ukraine including Pokrovsk, whose capture could enable Moscow to open up new lines of attack and complicate Ukrainian logistics in the east.

Donetsk’s regional governor said a filtering station had stopped working because of heavy fighting, severing the water supply to Pokrovsk.

He said it would be impossible to fix soon and renewed calls to civilians to flee the town.

“The situation is difficult and it won’t get better soon. So I again call on you to evacuate!” the official, Vadym Filashkin, wrote in a statement on the Telegram messaging app.

Russian forces have knocked out power and water to a rail hub in northern Ukraine and severed water supplies to the eastern town of Pokrovsk:

President Volodymyr Zelensky has dismissed a Chinese-Brazilian peace initiative for the war in Ukraine as “destructive”, and complained that Kyiv had not been involved in the process.

China and Brazil called in May for an international peace conference recognised by both Russia and Ukraine, involving equal participation of all parties, and what they called fair discussion of all peace plans.

“The Chinese-Brazilian proposal is … destructive, it’s just a political statement,” Zelenskiy said.

“How can you offer ‘here is our initiative’ without asking anything from us?”

Zelensky said the initiative lacked respect for Ukraine and its territorial integrity, according to video footage posted by Metropoles, and that Russian President Vladimir Putin had to take steps to show he wants to end the war.

The spokesperson for the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine Andrii Demchenko has told national TV Russian sabotage activity on the border has decreased in recent weeks.

He said: “Recently, the activity of the enemy sabotage and reconnaissance groups, especially in Sumy region, has decreased significantly. The enemy has not given up its sabotage activities, and we can observe this both in Sumy and Chernihiv regions – they are trying to penetrate into our territory to plant mines in some directions, hoping that Ukrainian soldiers will stumble upon such a trap.

“However, all the components of the Defense Forces act together in order to timely expose such actions of the enemy,” said Demchenko.

A Ukrainian academic has thanked a charity for helping him relocate to the UK as the threat to scholars is said to be the worst globally since the rise of Nazi Germany.

Academics are routinely targeted by authoritarian governments and extremist groups who view free thinking and freedom of expression as a threat.

Operating for nearly a century, charity Cara supports scholars fleeing violence, repression and threats to intellectual and individual freedom.

The anonymous academic thanked Cara for granting him a safe haven in the UK. He said: “The first days of the Russia’s full-scale invasion of my home country of Ukraine were the most shocking days of my life. Like many citizens of Kyiv, I spent my nights in a bomb shelter, and during the day I tried to get scarce food products, periodically hiding in the subway during air raids.

“Unsurprisingly, the Institute where I worked as a cancer researcher suspended all work … This was the moment when I truly realized how important and valuable Cara is … I am eternally grateful to all the people who have made it possible for me to be safe and have given me the opportunity to continue doing research, the work that I have always loved.”

In the past three academic years alone the long-established charity has received over 2,000 requests for help from at-risk academics urgently seeking temporary refuge in the UK with wars raging in Ukraine and Gaza.

This represents nearly a 400% increase in demand for assistance, compared to the previous three academic years and is the highest level the charity has recorded since its foundation in the 1930s as a rescue mission for academics in Germany under threat from the Nazis.

The Kremlin said on Thursday that letting Ukraine use Western weaponry to strike Russian territory would deepen Western involvement in the conflict and trigger a reaction from Moscow, the TASS state news agency reported.

US secretary of state Antony Blinken is wrapping up a three-nation, Ukraine-focused European tour in Poland after hearing repeated appeals from Ukrainian officials to use Western-supplied weaponry for long-range strikes inside Russia.

Mr Blinken travelled to Warsaw on Thursday after spending a day in Kyiv with British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, during which they pledged to bring the Ukrainian requests to their leaders.

President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer are to meet in the United States on Friday amid signs both Washington and London are growing more receptive to allowing the Ukrainians to use their arms to hit targets deeper inside Russia than previously approved.

Russian forces attacked energy infrastructure in six regions in the past 24 hours, Ukraine’s energy ministry said on Thursday.

The ministry said via the Telegram messaging app that the attacks had temporarily disrupted the work of power substations in at least three of these regions.

Russian drones inflicted significant damage to the northern Ukrainian town of Konotop’s energy infrastructure in an overnight attack that injured at least 14 people and cut electricity to the settlement, local officials said on Thursday.

Rescuers were working to restore power in the town, which had a pre-war population of about 83,000. Regional officials said there had been 10 explosions during the attack and Mayor Artem Semenikhin said the power system was in critical condition.

“At the moment, energy workers are doing everything they can to provide electricity to the hospital and the water supply system,” he said in the early hours of Thursday.

Hospitals continued to operate, he added.

As winter draws near, the need to help Ukraine protect the home front grows ever more urgent. The increasingly close relationship between Moscow and Tehran also has highly disturbing implications for the situation in the Middle East.

Ukraine‘s air force said shot down 44 out of 64 drones launched by Russia overnight, officials said.

Russia also fired five missiles, the air force added in a statement posted on Telegram. It was unclear whether these reached their targets or were shot down.