Here is the situation on Monday, December 23:
Fighting:
- 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.
- Russia’s Ministry of Defence said its air defence 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 Defence Ministry said on Sunday.
- Ukraine military’s general said Sontsivka, a village in the east, was in a sector subject to 26 Russian attacks in the past 24 hours. The general staff also reported heavy fighting near Pokrovsk, with 34 Russian attempts to pierce defences.
- Ukraine’s Parliamentary Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets said Russian forces executed five unarmed Ukrainian prisoners of war on Sunday.
- Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) named Colonel General Alexei Kim, a deputy chief of Russia’s General Staff as one of the people it suspects of ordering a missile strike on a hotel in eastern Ukraine in August. The SBU said he acted “with the motive of deliberately killing employees of” the Reuters news agency.
Diplomacy and Security
- Russian President Vladimir Putin has pledged retaliation after Ukrainian drones struck residential buildings in the city of Kazan in Russia’s Tatarstan region.
- Putin met Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico in the Kremlin on Sunday, a rare visit by a European Union leader to Moscow as a contract allowing Russian gas to transit through Ukraine nears expiry.
- South Korea says North Korea is preparing to deploy additional troops and weapons to aid Russia in its full-scale war against Ukraine, Yonhap news agency reported.
- US President-elect Donald Trump said on Sunday that Russian President Vladimir Putin has expressed a desire to meet him “as soon as possible” to discuss the war in Ukraine.
