Here are the key developments on 1,033. Day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Here is the situation on Monday, December 23rd:
Battle:
- More than 1,000 North Korean soldiers have been killed or wounded in Russia’s war with Ukraine, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said on Monday.
- The Russian Defense Ministry said its air defense systems destroyed 42 Ukrainian drones over five Russian regions overnight on Sunday.
- Russian forces have captured two villages in Ukraine, one in the Kharkiv region in the northeast and one in the eastern Donetsk region, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Sunday.
- The Ukrainian military general said Sontsivka, a village in the east, was in a sector that had been subject to 26 Russian attacks in the past 24 hours. The General Staff also reported heavy fighting near Pokrovsk, with 34 Russian attempts to break through the defenses.
- Ukraine’s parliamentary human rights commissioner Dmytro Lubinets said Russian forces executed five unarmed Ukrainian prisoners of war on Sunday.
- The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) named Col. Gen. Alexei Kim, a deputy chief of the Russian General Staff, as one of the people it suspects of ordering a rocket attack on a hotel in eastern Ukraine in August. The SBU said he acted “with the motive premeditated.” killing Employee of the Reuters news agency.
Diplomacy and Security
- Russian President Vladimir Putin has pledged Retaliation after Ukrainian drones attacked residential buildings in the city of Kazan in Russia’s Tatarstan region.
- Putin met Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico at the Kremlin on Sunday, a rare visit to Moscow by an EU leader as a deal to transit Russian gas through Ukraine soon expires.
- South Korea says North Korea is preparing to deploy additional troops and weapons to support Russia in its all-out war against Ukraine, Yonhap news agency reported.
- Elected US President Donald Trump said on Sunday that Russian President Vladimir Putin had expressed a desire to meet him “as soon as possible” to discuss the war in Ukraine.
