Here are the key developments on 1,036. Day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Here is the situation on Thursday, December 26th:
Battle:
- Russian and Ukrainian forces once again fought fierce battles around the strategically important city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine. Ukraine’s General Staff said 35 Russian attacks were reported around the city on Wednesday. “Three Russian armies are concentrated here against us,” Ukrainian regional commander Viktor Trehubov was quoted as saying.
- Russia launched a massive attack on Ukraine on Christmas Day using cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and drones.
- The Russian attack injured at least six people in the northeastern city of Kharkiv and killed one in the Dnipropetrovsk region, governors there said.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned Russia’s “inhumane” attack, which included more than 170 missiles and drones, some of which knocked out power in several regions of the country.
- US President Joe Biden said the “outrageous attack was aimed at cutting off the Ukrainian people’s access to heat and electricity in the winter and endangering the security of their grid.”
- British Prime Minister Keir Starmer condemned Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s energy grid and said there was “no respite even at Christmas.”
- Russia, meanwhile, said five people were killed by Ukrainian missile strikes and a crashed drone in the border region of Kursk and North Ossetia in the Caucasus.
- The Russian Foreign Ministry confirmed that Australia had contacted Moscow about the possible capture by the Russian army of an Australian citizen fighting with Ukrainian forces and was reviewing the matter.
Military aid:
- Biden said he had asked the US Defense Department to continue the surge in arms sales to Ukraine after condemning Russia’s attack on Ukraine on Christmas Day.
Diplomacy:
- Pope Francis called for “silencing the guns worldwide” in his Christmas address and appealed for peace in the Middle East, Ukraine and Sudan, while denouncing the “extremely serious” humanitarian situation in Gaza.
- Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin, who was released in August as part of a prisoner exchange in Moscow, is on Russia’s wanted list, according to an Interior Ministry database obtained by the AFP news agency. Yashin, 41, was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison at the end of 2022 for “denouncing the murder of civilians” in the Ukrainian city of Bukha.
Regional security:
- The Russian Foreign Ministry accused NATO of wanting to turn Moldova into a logistics center for supplying the Ukrainian army and bringing the Western alliance’s military infrastructure closer to Russia.
- Arto Pahkin, operations manager of Finland’s power grid, told the country’s public broadcaster Yle that “the possibility of sabotage cannot be ruled out” after a submarine cable between Finland and Estonia collapsed. It is the latest in a series of incidents involving telecommunications cables and energy pipelines in the Baltic Sea.
- A “terrorist act” sank the Russian cargo ship that sank in international waters in the Mediterranean this week, the Russian state-owned company that owns the ship said. The company Oboronlogistika said it believes a targeted terrorist attack was carried out against the Ursa Major on December 23, 2024, without specifying who may be behind the act or why.
- The Azerbaijan Airlines passenger plane that crashed near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan, killing 38 people, had previously diverted from an area of Russia that Moscow had recently defended against Ukrainian drone attacks. Authorities in two Russian regions bordering Chechnya, Ingushetia and North Ossetia, reported drone attacks on Wednesday morning.
