That’s all for today, thanks for following our live coverage on day 679 of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Here’s a summary of the day’s events:
Ukraine launched 12 missiles and several drones in the early hours of Wednesday on Russia’s southern region of Belgorod, Russia’s defence ministry and local authorities said.
The Polish foreign minister has called on allies to deliver long-range missiles to Ukraine to help Kyiv target “launch sites and command centres” amid a new wave of Russian attacks.
Russian missile and drone strikes on Kyiv and the north-eastern city of Kharkiv killed at least five people on Tuesday and injured dozens of others, Ukrainian officials said. The attacks caused widespread damage and hit power supplies, Ukraine’s authorities said.
The Nato Support and Procurement Agency has said would support a group of countries with a contract for up to 1,000 Patriot Guidance Enhanced Missiles.
The EU has imposed sanctions on Russia’s state-run diamond company Alrosa and its chief executive as part of a ban on imports of the precious stones over the Ukraine war.
Polish farmers will resume their blockade at a border crossing with Ukraine from tomorrow, Reuters reports. “I will try to convince carriers not to use blockades as a method of defending their interests. We will do everything to effectively protect their interests,” prime minister Donald Tusk said during a press conference.
Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said gas pipelines had been damaged in Kyiv’s Pecherskyi district, while electricity and water had been cut off in several districts of the capital. Heating and water supplies were damaged in Kharkiv, said its mayor, Ihor Terekhov.
Russia said it had accidentally bombed a village in its own southern Voronezh region near Ukraine. In a statement quoted by Russian news agencies, the Russian army said “an abnormal discharge of aircraft ammunition occurred over the village of Petropavlovka in the Voronezh region. There are no casualties.”
Norway will send two F-16 fighter jets to Denmark to contribute to the training of Ukrainian pilots on the use of the US-made airplane, the Norwegian defence minister has said.
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, urged faster supplies of air defence systems, combat drones and long-range missiles. His ministry said Kuleba called on Ukraine’s western partners to respond to a new Russian strike on Ukraine by “accelerating the supply of additional air defence systems, combat drones of all types, long-range missiles with a range of 300+ km”.
Lithuania’s president, Gitanas Nausėda, and Latvia’s president, Edgars Rinkēvičs, also called for more air defence systems for Ukraine.
Turkey said it would not allow two British minehunter ships to transit its waters en route to the Black Sea for use by Ukraine. Turkey is enforcing an international pact under which it can block passage of military ships of warring parties through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits. It exempts naval ships if they are returning to their normal home bases in the Black Sea.
One man was killed and seven people were injured on Tuesday in a Ukrainian attack on the city and region of Belgorod, near Russia’s border with Ukraine, the Russian defence ministry and regional officials claimed.
Vladimir Putin has expressed condolences to Iran’s leadership over blasts that killed more than 100 people in the city of Kerman, the Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported, citing a Kremlin statement.
The Russian president condemned “terrorism in all its forms” on Wednesday and said the attack on peaceful people was “shocking in its cruelty and cynicism”.
Updated
A Russian regional governor said on Wednesday he had ordered the rebuilding of nine houses in a village that was accidentally bombed by one of Russia’s own warplanes.
The incident took place on Tuesday, when the state news agency RIA quoted the defence ministry as reporting an “abnormal discharge of aircraft ammunition” over the village of Petropavlovka in the southern region of Voronezh.
Alexander Gusev said the houses would be rebuilt as soon as possible, and there had also been damage to a small local school, an arts centre and an administrative building.
No one had been killed but four people were treated for minor injuries and residents had access to psychological support, he said. Five cars and a tractor had also been damaged, and the owners would get compensation.
“Not a single resident will be left without help, we will support everyone as much as possible,” Gusev said.
Authorities did not say what caused the incident. While the damage was limited, it was embarrassing for Russia’s military and came at a time of high alert in its southern regions close to the border with Ukraine.
Over the new year period, Russia staged some of its heaviest missile and drone strikes on Ukraine since its full-scale invasion in February 2022. On Saturday, Ukraine’s deadliest cross-border attack of the war killed 25 people in Belgorod, near the border, officials said.
Updated
Ukraine’s defence ministry has said it is grateful to Norway for providing F-16 fighter jets for training personnel.
Norway is presenting two F-16 fighter jets that will train and educate Ukrainian personnel in Denmark.
— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) January 3, 2024
We are grateful to our Norwegian friends for their unwavering support!
🇺🇦🤝🇳🇴 https://t.co/WFbGp4xS0a
Updated
Nato agency to help purchase up to 1,000 Patriot missiles
The Nato Support and Procurement Agency said today that it would support a group of countries with a contract for up to 1,000 Patriot Guidance Enhanced Missiles.
The agency said:
The Nato Support and Procurement Agency (NSPA) will support a coalition of nations, including Germany, the Netherlands, Romania and Spain, with a contract for a combined quantity of up to 1,000 Patriot™ Guidance Enhanced Missiles (Gem-T), if all options are exercised.
The contract includes qualification of updated components, addition of new suppliers, test equipment, and spares to support future sustainment. Other user nations are expected to benefit from the conditions of the contract.
The Agency awarded a production and delivery contract to Comlog, a joint venture between Raytheon, an RTX business (NYSE: RTX), and MBDA. To support production and delivery, Comlog will expand the production capacity of Gem-T missiles in Europe.
Stacy A Cummings, the agency’s general manager, said:
This contract demonstrates that NSPA, as a primary enabler of the alliance, can successfully deliver effective and cost-efficient multinational solutions to nations, while reinforcing European industrial capacities.
Through close Euro-Atlantic cooperation between allies and industry, NSPA has enabled the consolidation of requirements through the award of this complex contract.
Customer nations have achieved economies of scale, reduced their logistics footprint, and are obtaining capable solutions and support under a proven turnkey legal framework.
Updated
Polish farmers will resume their blockade at a border crossing with Ukraine from tomorrow, Reuters reports.
The farmers’ leader, Roman Kondrow, said:
We have not received written confirmation that our demands will be met, so we are continuing the protest.
“I will try to convince carriers not to use blockades as a method of defending their interests. We will do everything to effectively protect their interests,” prime minister Donald Tusk said during a press conference.
“The blockade in the face of bombings and increasingly intense actions from Russia does not make this task easier for us. I will be more effective in working in favour of Polish carriers when there is no blockade.”
Tusk said in December that he believed Poland was close to being able to end the truckers’ protest.
Updated
Oleksandr Kubrakov, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister for restoration, said today that the first family concluded a property purchase agreement using compensation for destroyed housing, and plans to move to a new home in Bucha.
The deputy prime minister added:
We want those Ukrainians who need it to feel confident applying for governmental support toward repairing houses or buying new property. Especially if this will let them come back to Ukraine from abroad as did this first family.
The first family concluded a property purchase agreement using the compensation for destroyed housing. We wish them a warm & fast moving in their new home at #Bucha ❤️
— Oleksandr Kubrakov (@OlKubrakov) January 3, 2024
In August we launched the compensatory mechanism aimed at those whose homes were destroyed beyond repair. With… pic.twitter.com/xXHxr3Nvm7
Here are the latest images coming across the wires from Ukraine and elsewhere:
Updated
The Russian military has said it shot down 12 Ukrainian missiles over the southern Belgorod region bordering Ukraine, as Kyiv’s forces seek to embarrass President Vladimir Putin and puncture his argument that life in Russia is going on as normal despite the 22-month war.
The Belgorod governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said the situation in the regional capital, also called Belgorod, remained tense. The city came under two rounds of shelling on Wednesday morning, Gladkov wrote on Telegram.
“Air defence systems worked,” he added, promising more details about possible damage after inspecting the area later in the day. Wednesday was a national holiday in Russia.
Russia’s defence ministry said Ukraine fired two Tochka-U missiles and seven rockets at the region late on Tuesday, then launched six Tochka-U missiles and six Vilkha rockets on Wednesday morning.
The Soviet-built Tochka-U tactical missile system has a range of up to 75 miles (120km). It has a massive warhead that can carry cluster munitions. Ukraine has received some cluster munitions from the US but Tochka-U and Vilkha can use their own cluster munitions.
The Russian side of the border with Ukraine has come under increasingly frequent attack in recent days. Villages have sporadically been targeted by artillery fire, rockets, mortar shells and drones launched from thick forests where they are hard to detect.
As missiles and drones have fallen on Ukrainian cities, Kyiv’s troops have aimed at the Belgorod regional capital, which lies roughly 60 miles north of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city.
Belgorod, which has a population of about 340,000, is the largest Russian city close to the Ukrainian border. It can be reached by relatively simple and movable weapons such as multiple rocket launchers.
On Saturday, shelling of Belgorod killed 25 people, including five children, in one of the deadliest attacks on Russian soil since Moscow’s full-scale invasion. A civilian was also killed Tuesday in a new rocket salvo.
Hitting Belgorod and disrupting city life is a dramatic way for Ukraine to show it can strike back against Russia, which in military terms outnumbers and outguns Kyiv’s forces.
The tactic appears to be having some success, with signs the attacks are unsettling the public, political leaders and military observers.
Putin lashed out against the Belgorod attacks. “They want to intimidate us and create uncertainty within our country,” he said on Monday, promising to intensify retaliatory strikes.
Answering a question from a soldier who asked him about civilian casualties in Belgorod, Putin said: “I also feel a simmering anger.”
Many Russian military bloggers have expressed regret about the country’s withdrawal from the border area in September 2022 after a swift Ukrainian counteroffensive, and have argued that Russia needs to seize more territory to secure Belgorod and other border areas.
The Russian government has tried to counter the successful strikes by describing the Ukrainians as “terrorists” who are indiscriminately targeting residential areas while insisting the Russian military aims only at depots, arms factories and other military facilities.
Ukrainian officials rarely acknowledge responsibility for strikes on Russian territory.
Updated
Norway will send two F-16 fighter jets to Denmark to contribute to the training of Ukrainian pilots on the use of the US-made airplane, the Norwegian defence minister has said.
F-16s have been on Ukraine’s wishlist as the country seeks to bolster its air force in the war with Russia, and Norway last year said it would join Denmark, the Netherlands and others in donating aircraft.
Norway has sent 10 instructors to Denmark to aid the education of Ukrainian pilots, the defence minister, Bjørn Arild Gram, said.
The Norwegian air force has replaced its F-16s with the successor model F-35.
Updated
The EU has imposed sanctions on Russia’s state-run diamond company Alrosa and its chief executive as part of a ban on imports of the precious stones over the Ukraine war.
The EU in December agreed to prohibit diamonds exported from Russia as it tightens sanctions to further sap the Kremlin’s coffers.
The 27-member bloc added Alrosa, the world’s largest diamond mining company, and its boss, Pavel Marinychev, to a blacklist subject to a visa ban and asset freeze in the EU.
The EU said the company – which accounts for 90% of Russia’s diamond production – “constitutes an important part of an economic sector that is providing substantial revenue to the government”.
Russia’s diamond exports totalled about $4bn in 2022.
The EU’s ban went into force on 1 January on natural and synthetic diamonds exported from Russia. A prohibition on Russian diamonds processed in third countries will be phased in by September.
The ban came after months of painstaking negotiations with G7 countries to set up a system to trace Russia diamonds.
Belgium, home to the world’s biggest diamond trading hub, said the system needed to be put in place to make any embargo effective.
The EU has so far imposed 12 rounds of unprecedented sanctions on Moscow since the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, launched the all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. However, the Russian economy has so far managed to adapt to the sanctions and dislocations caused by the conflict.
Updated
Poland urges long-range missiles for Ukraine after deadly strikes
The Polish foreign minister on Wednesday called on allies to deliver long-range missiles to Ukraine to help Kyiv target “launch sites and command centres” amid a new wave of Russian attacks.
A barrage of deadly missile strikes on Tuesday hit residential buildings in Ukraine’s capital Kyiv and the northeastern city of Kharkiv with five dead and dozens of civilians wounded.
On Wednesday, Poland’s top diplomat, Radosław Sikorski, said on social media that the West should respond “in language that Putin understands”.
He urged allies to provide Kyiv with “long-range missiles that will enable it to take out launch sites and command centres”.
Poland is among Ukraine’s staunchest allies, with the new administration in Warsaw doubling down on political support to the neighbouring country.
Sikorski also said the response to Russia pummelling Ukraine should include “tightening” of western sanctions against Moscow so that it “cannot make new weapons with smuggled components”.
Appointed in December as Poland’s foreign minister in the new pro-EU government, Sikorski chose Ukraine for his first visit abroad, where he said the west should “mobilise” its economy to arm Ukraine.
Updated
In news that likely shocked no one, Vladimir Putin last month announced that he will seek a fifth presidential term in the upcoming March elections.
In a country where Putin, 71, has come to dominate Russia’s political system and the media over the past two decades, the outcome will probably leave little room for imagination.
But while the election appears to be a formality, it will be held in a growingly conservative country that has been fundamentally changed by war, where all dissent has been criminalised and with prominent opposition politicians, such as Alexei Navalny and Ilya Yashin, behind bars.
The elections will be different in terms of the ground they cover too, with voting taking place in what Russia calls its new territories; parts of Ukraine now occupied by Russian forces.
“These elections are a means for Putin to legitimise his decision to go the war in Ukraine,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, based in Moscow.
Authoritarian leaders like Putin rely on elite support to govern, Kolesnikov said, and the elections and campaigning are also aimed at showing the political establishment that he still enjoys public backing despite Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed summer insurrection.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, Putin announced his candidacy at an event in the Kremlin honouring Russian soldiers who had fought in Ukraine, one of whom asked the Russian leader if he would run again.
Read more here.
Ukraine launched 12 missiles and several drones in the early hours of Wednesday on Russia’s southern region of Belgorod, Russia’s defence ministry and local authorities said.
The regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said the situation “continues to remain tense” in Belgorod, where Russia reported that 25 civilians including five children were killed in Ukrainian attacks on Saturday.
There was no word of any casualties from the latest attacks. Gladkov said the extent of damage would be assessed throughout the day.
Ukraine’s escalation of attacks on Belgorod over the new year period has come as Russia launched some of its most intense strikes on Ukraine since the war began almost two years ago. Kyiv said on Tuesday that Russia had fired more than 300 attack drones and missiles of various kinds at cities across Ukraine since Friday.
Belgorod, like other Russian regions on the border with Ukraine, has been hit by frequent low-level attacks since the start of the war but Saturday’s was by far the deadliest. President Vladimir Putin said it would “not go unpunished”.
One person was killed and seven were wounded in the region on Tuesday, Russian authorities said.
In Wednesday’s attacks, Russia’s defence ministry said Ukraine fired six Tochka-U ballistic missiles and six guided missiles from a Vilkha heavy multiple rocket launcher.
Gladkov said Ukraine also launched several drones on the region and the city of Belgorod, the administrative centre of the region.
Reuters could not independently verify the reports. There was no immediate comment from Ukraine.
Updated
Here are the latest images coming across the wires from Ukraine:
Alexandr Dolgopolov, the 35-year-old former Australian Open tennis quarter-finalist, is back in Kyiv awaiting a new deployment after serving on the frontline for several months defending his Ukrainian homeland.
He admits his family “were unhappy” at his joining up in 2022, a decision taken when he was watching TV images in Turkey where he had taken his sister and mother to safety after the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, launched the invasion.
“It is my home so I think you have to do something,” Dolgopolov told AFP in a phone interview. “There were lots of reasons, a courageous people, the barbarity of the enemy and I think just fighting for the good side, defending what is yours.”
Dolgopolov said despite having no military experience, strange as it seems his time in professional tennis – “I had been playing since I was two” – served him well in certain respects. “Sport is like a small war without killing people.
“Mentality helps you because in your [sporting] career you have to go through many, many tough moments like injuries, extreme heat, the travel. It’s a tough job, top-level sports.
Dolgopolov reached 13th in the world and won three titles before a wrist injury ended his career in 2021.
“Here in war when you have tough moments you know how you can recover from them, like being tired. In other situations such as taking fast decisions like in tennis … [and] good habits like being on time and being organised.”
Dolgopolov came through his first tour of duty unscathed but others were not so lucky - a Georgian volunteer was killed. “For sure that was a tough one for us,” said Dolgopolov. “He was quite a young guy, a really talented engineer and really nice.”
Dolgopolov said the lack of resources is having an impact and the west is not supplying enough military equipment.
“They [the Russians] passed a defence budget of 100 billion dollars a year for next three years.
“How can Ukraine win? Obviously we need much more equipment.”
Updated
Deadly strikes hit residential buildings in Ukraine and a Russian border region on Tuesday as an escalation of aerial attacks also wounded dozens and prompted Kyiv to urge speedier western weapons shipments.
In total, five people were killed and 130 wounded, authorities said. The bombardment of mainly Kyiv and Kharkiv came less than 24 hours after the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, vowed to step up strikes following an unprecedented Ukrainian attack on the Russian city of Belgorod.
“The enemy has planned their trajectories to cause as much damage as possible. This is an utterly premeditated terror,” said the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Since 29 December, Russia had launched nearly 300 missiles and more than 200 drones against Ukraine, he said.
Early on Wednesday, Ukrainian drones attacked the Russian city of Belgorod, the governor of the region said. Reports the previous day said a Ukrainian strike had killed at least one person and wounded up to seven.
Belgorod – which lies in Russia, north of Kharkiv in Ukraine – is a staging point for Russia’s invading forces, so has been repeatedly hit by Ukraine’s military as a legitimate target under the rules of war.
Summary
Good morning, this is day 679 of Vladimir Putin and Russia’s war against Ukraine. Here are the important developments:
Russian missile and drone strikes on Kyiv and the north-eastern city of Kharkiv killed at least five people on Tuesday and injured dozens of others, Ukrainian officials said. The attacks caused widespread damage and hit power supplies, Ukraine’s authorities said.
Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said gas pipelines had been damaged in Kyiv’s Pecherskyi district, while electricity and water had been cut off in several districts of the capital. Heating and water supplies were damaged in Kharkiv, said its mayor, Ihor Terekhov.
Russia said it had accidentally bombed a village in its own southern Voronezh region near Ukraine. In a statement quoted by Russian news agencies, the Russian army said “an abnormal discharge of aircraft ammunition occurred over the village of Petropavlovka in the Voronezh region. There are no casualties.”
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, urged faster supplies of air defence systems, combat drones and long-range missiles. His ministry said Kuleba called on Ukraine’s western partners to respond to a new Russian strike on Ukraine by “accelerating the supply of additional air defence systems, combat drones of all types, long-range missiles with a range of 300+ km”.
Lithuania’s president, Gitanas Nausėda, and Latvia’s president, Edgars Rinkēvičs, also called for more air defence systems for Ukraine.
Turkey said it would not allow two British minehunter ships to transit its waters en route to the Black Sea for use by Ukraine. Turkey is enforcing an international pact under which it can block passage of military ships of warring parties through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits. It exempts naval ships if they are returning to their normal home bases in the Black Sea.
One man was killed and seven people were injured on Tuesday in a Ukrainian attack on the city and region of Belgorod, near Russia’s border with Ukraine, the Russian defence ministry and regional officials claimed.
