Ukraine has retaken more than 600 settlements from Russian forces in the past month, its ministry for reintegration of the temporary occupied territories said.

These also include 75 settlements from the recently annexed Kherson region which serves as a highly strategic region in the south of the besieged country and claimed by Russia.

Around 502 settlements have been freed and retaken by Ukrainian soldiers in Kharkiv which lies in the northeast Ukraine and was heavily battered in the Russian invasion. However, Ukrainian troops advanced deeper into the Russian lines last month.

A total of 43 settlements have been recaptured in the Donetsk region and seven in the Luhansk region, the ministry said.

"The area of liberated Ukrainian territories has increased significantly," the ministry said in a statement.

Russia has warned Ukraine that joining Nato could trigger a third world war as alliance members consider Kyiv’s application.

A senior Russian official claimed Ukraine knew the severe consequences of joining, as he reiterated his country’s opposition to Ukraine becoming part of the military alliance.

“Kyiv is well aware that such a step would mean a guaranteed escalation to a World War Three,” Alexander Venediktov, deputy secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, is reported as saying by the Tass news agency.

“Apparently, that’s what they are counting on – to create informational noise and draw attention to themselves once again.”

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has claimed that Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is a “crusade against democracy”.

Mr Scholz also pledged to keep supporting Ukraine “for as long as it takes” while speaking at a summit in Berlin.

“Vladimir Putin and his enablers have made one thing very clear: this war is not only about Ukraine. They consider their war against Ukraine to be part of a larger crusade, a crusade against liberal democracy,” said Scholz.

He added that Germany will “continue our support for as long as it takes, for as long as that support is needed to fend off Russia’s abhorrent aggression”.

It followed up an attack last month by Scholz on Russia, when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted as saying on Thursday that the goals of Moscow’s “special military operation” in Ukraine were unchanged, but that they could be achieved through negotiations.

The comments to the Russian newspaper Izvestia were the latest in a series of statements this week stressing Moscow’s openness to talks - a change of tone that follows a run of humiliating defeats for Russian forces as the war in Ukraine nears the end of its eighth month.

“The direction has not changed, the special military operation continues, it continues in order for us to achieve our goals,” Peskov was quoted as saying. “However, we have repeatedly reiterated that we remain open to negotiations to achieve our objectives.”

Peskov added, however, that he did not see any prospects for talks with the West in the near future because of its “hostile” attitude towards Russia.

“It takes two sides to have a dialogue. As the West is now taking a very, very hostile stance towards us, it’s unlikely that there will be any such prospect in the near future,” - Peskov told Kazakhstan’s Khabar 24 TV channel, according to the Russian news agency TASS.

“Nevertheless, Turkey, as well as a number of other countries, continue to try to mediate in some way.”

While Russia has said before that it is prepared to negotiate, the repeated references this week to the possibility of dialogue are striking.

The governor of a Russian border region accused Ukraine of shelling an apartment block there on Thursday but a Kyiv official said a stray Russian missile was to blame, in only one of a series of apparent strikes on Russian border towns.

Vyacheslav Gladkov said a school had been damaged in a village close to the border, and that the top floor of an apartment block had been struck in the city of Belgorod.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said on Twitter that Russia had launched a missile towards the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv but “something went wrong and it hit (a) residential building”.

Video showed rubble next to a 16-storey apartment block with a large rupture near its roof. Reuters could not independently establish who was to blame. Gladkov said no one had been hurt.

Separately, Gladkov said that a border post in the frontier town of Shebekino, which adjoins Ukraine‘s eastern region of Kharkiv, and an ammunition depot near Belgorod city had been destroyed in Ukrainian strikes. He said that there had been no casualties in either strike.

Video, apparently of the ammunition depot, shared on social media showed a major fire illuminating the night sky.

Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller told Russia‘s State TV Channel One on Thursday that a big section of the damaged Nord Stream pipelines might need to be replaced, TASS news agency said.

A section of the pipeline was now filled with water across a significant distance, TASS paraphrased Miller as saying, in a series of bullet points on the agency’s Telegram channel.

Separately, Prime news agency paraphrased Miller as saying the affected length covered hundreds of kilometres on the Russian side of the pipeline.

On Wednesday, Miller, head of the Russian state-controlled natural gas monopoly, said repairs to the damaged Nord Stream pipelines would take at least a year.

Talks on demilitarising Europe’s largest nuclear plant in Ukraine need a rapid solution to eliminate a “precarious” situation amid continued shelling, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said.

Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, was speaking after a day of talks with Ukrainian officials. He also said he had told Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin that the continued detention of the deputy director of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station was unacceptable.

“We need to continue working to protect the plant. As I told (Putin), it continues to be extremely fragile, extremely precarious,” Grossi told a news conference after the day of talks in Kyiv.

“I am trying to have this wrapped up as soon as possible ... it is of course counter-intuitive to talk about protecting something that is being shelled,” Grossi said.

“...there are days when it seems to be more calm, but then the next day we are again on a blackout and the external power lines are completely cut and we don’t know whether it is going to be an emergency... So these things continue. It hasn’t improved in any tangible way.”

Ukraine‘s allies vowed Thursday to supply the besieged nation with advanced air defence systems as Russian forces attacked the Kyiv region with kamikaze drones and fired missiles elsewhere at civilian targets, payback for the bombing of a strategic bridge linking Russia with annexed Crimea.

Missile strikes killed at least five people and destroyed an apartment building in the southern city of Mykolaiv, while heavy artillery damaged more than 30 houses, a hospital, a kindergarten and other buildings in the town of Nikopol, across the river from the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.

Russia has intensified its bombardment of civilian areas in recent weeks as its military lost ground in multiple occupied regions of Ukraine that Russian president Vladimir Putin has illegally annexed.

Kremlin war hawks have urged Putin to escalate the bombing campaign even more to punish Ukraine for Saturday’s truck bomb attack on the landmark Kerch Bridge.

Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for the attack.“We need to protect our sky from the terror of Russia,” Ukrainian president Volodymr Zelensky told the Council of Europe, a human rights organisation. “If this is done, it will be a fundamental step to end the entire war in the near future.”

The Russian-installed governor of the southern Kherson region has told residents to take their children and flee, in one of the starkest signs yet that Moscow is losing its grip on territory it claims to have annexed.

In a video statement on Telegram, Vladimir Saldo publicly asked for Moscow’s help transporting civilians to safer regions of Russia.

“Every day, the cities of Kherson region are subjected to missile attacks,” Saldo said.

“As such, the leadership of Kherson administration has decided to provide Kherson families with the option to travel to other regions of the Russian Federation to rest and study.

“We suggested that all residents of the Kherson region, if they wish, to protect themselves from the consequences of missile strikes... go to other regions,” he said, advising people to “leave with their children”.

Kherson is one of four partially occupied Ukrainian provinces that Russia claims to have annexed this month, and arguably the most strategically important. It controls both the only land route to the Crimea peninsula Russia seized in 2014.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has claimed that Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is a “crusade against democracy” and pledged to keep supporting Ukraine “for as long as it takes”. David Harding reports: