Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has told officials to stop talking to reporters about Kyiv’s military tactics against Russia, saying such remarks were “frankly irresponsible”.

The devastation at the Russian air base in Crimea suggests Kyiv may have obtained new long-range strike capability with potential to change the course of the war. The base is well beyond the range of advanced rockets that western countries acknowledge sending to Ukraine so far, with some western military experts saying the scale of the damage and the apparent precision of the strike suggested a powerful new capability with potentially important implications.

The UN has urged a demilitarised zone around Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant as Russia and Ukraine trade accusations over more shelling of the plant on Thursday. Ukraine’s nuclear energy company said it had been shelled five times by Russian forces on Thursday, resulting in staff being unable to change shifts.

Russia has doubled the number of air strikes on Ukraine’s military positions and civilian infrastructure compared with the previous week, Ukrainian Brigadier General Oleksiy Hromov said: “The enemy’s planes and helicopters avoid flying into the range of our air defences, and therefore the accuracy of these strikes is low”.

Ukraine aims to evacuate 2/3 of residents from areas it controls in the eastern battleground region of Donetsk before winter, partly out of concern people won’t be able to stay warm amid war-damaged infrastructure, the deputy prime minister said. The government plans to evacuate some 220,000 people out of around 350,000, including 52,000 children.