MoD intelligence update says up to eight brigades have been committed to ‘heavy but inconclusive’ fighting

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Russian forces are believed to have suffered some of the country’s biggest casualty rates so far this year as a result of continued “heavy but inconclusive” fighting around the Donetsk oblast town of Avdiivka.

According to the UK Ministry of Defence’s intelligence update on Saturday morning, Russia has probably committed elements of up to eight brigades to the sector where it initiated a “major offensive effort” in mid-October.

Russia loses brigade’s worth of troops in push for Avdiivka, says Zelenskiy; heavy shelling hits Kherson; Macron condemns Orbán’s meeting with Putin

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The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, claimed that Russian forces had lost at least a brigade’s worth of troops attempting to advance on Ukraine’s eastern town of Avdiivka. Russia began a renewed push to encircle the embattled town in mid-October, trying to overwhelm Ukrainian positions with constant barrages of artillery and waves of troops and fighting vehicles, according to reports.

Russian forces have heavily shelled the centre of the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, injuring a number of people and damaging at least 10 buildings, a senior local official and emergency workers said.

The European Council has outlined plans to seize the profits from frozen Russian assets and direct billions of euros to support Ukraine. In a set of formal public conclusions after the culmination of an EU leaders’ summit, it said that “extraordinary revenues held by private entities stemming directly from Russia’s immobilised assets” could be directed to support Ukraine and its recovery.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has condemned the Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán’s recent meeting and handshake with Vladimir Putin. “In the situation we are in with Russia, we should not use these bilateral contacts to negotiate things about ourselves that would weaken our unity [on Ukraine],” Macron said after the EU leaders’ meeting in Brussels.

Russia’s top investigative body has said it had opened a criminal inquiry into the attempted murder of former Ukrainian lawmaker Oleg Tsaryov, a pro-Russian figure who was reported to have been lined up by Moscow to lead a puppet administration in Kyiv after Russia’s invasion. He is in intensive care after being shot, a Russian official said.

The wives and family of enlisted Ukrainian soldiers have gathered at Independence Square in Kyiv to call for the right to voluntarily demobilise after 18 months. “Our servicemen are strong, but they are not robots,” protesters shouted during the rally.

The new Slovak prime minister, Robert Fico, has told other EU leaders that €50bn in EU aid to Ukraine should include guarantees that the funds would not be misappropriated, his office said. “Ukraine is among the most corrupt countries in the world,” he claimed.

Ukraine’s president tells British PM brigade’s worth of troops lost trying to encircle embattled city; Putin demands action on weapons trafficking

• Russia-Ukraine war at a glance: what we know on day 611

The Russian-installed official Vladimir Rogov has claimed Russia destroyed “at least four” of the Leopard tanks supplied to Ukraine by the west in the Zaporizhzhia region within the past 24 hours.

Zaporizhzhia is one of the regions Russia partly occupies and has claimed to annex.

I think it’s really important that one of the outcomes of this meeting is that we don’t lose focus on Ukraine. Because of all the other things that are happening in the world, and not least in the Middle East, it would be very easy to lose focus on the war in Ukraine – and essential that we don’t do that.