Here is the situation on Sunday, January 5:
Fighting
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Russia has pledged to respond after it claimed to have shot down eight US-supplied ATACMS missiles fired by Ukraine at its border region of Belgorod.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has declared that Russian and North Korean forces suffered heavy losses in fighting in Russia’s southern Kursk region. He said up to a battalion of North Korean soldiers were killed in Makhnovka village.
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Zelenskyy also said guided Russian bomb strikes hit two villages in Sumy region and the neighbouring Kharkiv region.
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A Russian guided bomb attack wounded 10 people, including two children, in a village in Ukraine’s northeastern Sumy region, near the Russian border.
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Ukraine’s air force said its air defence shot down 61 out of 103 drones launched by Russia in an overnight attack. It said that 42 other drones were “lost”.
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The Russian media outlet Izvestia said a Ukrainian drone attack killed its freelance correspondent Alexander Martemyanov. Data previously provided by the Committee to Protect Journalists counted at least 15 journalists killed since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
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Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, writing on her ministry’s website, denounced the death of Martemyanov as a “deliberate murder”.
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Russia’s RIA news agency said two of its correspondents travelling with Martemyanov were injured in the incident, along with two journalists working for a publication in Donetsk.
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Russia’s Defence Ministry said its forces had taken control of the village of Nadiya in Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region and had shot down eight US-made ATACMS missiles.
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The ministry also said its air defence systems had shot down 10 Ukrainian drones over Russian territory, including three over the northern Leningrad region.
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Russia’s Defence Ministry said its forces had taken control of the village of Nadiya in Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region, Russian news agencies reported.
Politics and diplomacy
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The pro-Russian breakaway Moldovan region of Transnistria has been left without Russian gas supplies transiting through neighbouring Ukraine, forcing it to implement rolling power cuts, local authorities said.
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Oil from two ageing and damaged Russian tankers was detected off the coast of Sevastopol, the largest city in Moscow-annexed Crimea, a Moscow-installed official said.
