Ukrainians braced for a winter with little or no power in several areas including Kyiv where temperatures have already dropped below freezing as relentless Russian strikes crippled half of the country's energy capacity. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged residents of Kyiv and several other areas to limit electricity use.

POWER SUPPLIES

* The head of Ukraine's national power grid operator said the damage dealt to Ukrainian power generating facilities by Russian missile attacks was "colossal".

* Zelenskiy said half of the country's power capacity had been knocked out by Russian rockets.

* The Kremlin said no substantive progress had been made towards creating a security zone around Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine, once again accusing Kyiv of shelling at the plant and risking a nuclear incident.

* There are no immediate nuclear safety or security concerns at the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia plant in Ukraine despite shelling at the weekend that caused widespread damage, the U.N. atomic watchdog said after its experts toured the site.

* Moscow and Kyiv both blamed the other for the shelling of the facility.

CONFLICT

* Battles continued to rage in the east, where Russia has sent some of the forces it moved following its withdrawal from around Kherson city in the south, pressing an offensive of its own along a stretch of frontline west of the city of Donetsk held by its proxies since 2014.

* "The enemy does not stop shelling the positions of our troops and settlements near the contact line (in the Donetsk region)," the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said.

* Russian shelling hit a humanitarian aid distribution centre in the town of Orihiv in southeastern Ukraine, killing a volunteer and wounding two women, the regional governor said.

* Reuters could not independently verify the battlefield accounts.

* Ukraine's SBU security service and police raided a 1,000-year-old Orthodox Christian monastery in Kyiv as part of operations to counter suspected "subversive activities by Russian special services", the SBU said.

* Russia's Orthodox Church condemned the raid as an "act of intimidation".

* Russian President Vladimir Putin will in the coming days meet the mothers of reservists called up to fight in Ukraine, the Kremlin said.

QUOTE

"Stock up on warm clothes, blankets, think about options that will help you wait a long outage," said Sergey Kovalenko, the head of YASNO, which provides energy for Kyiv.

"It's better to do it now than to be miserable." (Compiled by Shri Navaratnam and Alex Richardson)