UN Security Council plans emergency meeting on Ukraine Monday

UNITED NATIONS: The UN Security Council will meet Monday to discuss Ukraine, a revised scheduled showed, after Kyiv’s mayor urged residents to leave the capital due to mass heating outages caused by Russian strikes.

“The Russian Federation has reached an appalling new level of war crimes and crimes against humanity by its terror against civilians,” Ukrainian ambassador Andriy Melnyk said in a letter to the Security Council seen by AFP on Friday.

The latest strikes left half of the residential buildings in Kyiv without heating in sub-zero temperatures, Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said.

The Kremlin also confirmed firing an Oreshnik ballistic missile on Ukraine for the second time since the war began in February 2022.

“The Russian Federation regime officially claims that it used an intermediate-range ballistic missile, the so-called ‘Oreshnik’, against the Lviv region,” the ambassador’s letter continued.

“Such a strike represents a grave and unprecedented threat to the security of the European continent.”

Moscow claims the Oreshnik, which can be equipped with both nuclear and conventional warheads, is impossible to stop

Ukraine’s request for the emergency UNSC meeting was supported by six members — France, Latvia, Denmark, Greece, Liberia and the United Kingdom — diplomatic sources told AFP.