Summary of the day
Thank you for following the Russia-Ukraine war live blog today. It will be closed shortly but you can continue to follow the latest news here. Below is a closing summary of today’s key posts.
A ceasefire in the Russian-Ukrainian war would not lead to political dialogue, and would only benefit Russia, Zelenskiy said on Thursday during a visit to Estonia. Zelenskiy was meeting with the country’s leaders as a part of a wider tour of the Baltic region.
Estonian president Alar Karis called for long-term defence investment as Ukrainian leaders visited Tallinn on Thursday. “Lasting peace requires long-term investment in our defence capabilities,” he said.
Switzerland and Ukraine will host peace formula talks at Davos on Sunday. It is the latest in a series of meetings to rally support for Ukraine’s peace plan and will be the fourth of its kind and the biggest yet.
Ukraine’s parliament have refused to debate a controversial bill aimed at drafting more soldiers. Speaking after a closed door meeting with Ukraine’s military leaders, David Arakhamia, ruling party leader said “some provisions directly violate human rights”.
Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, said he could meet his Ukrainian counterpart on 29 January.
13 people were injured, including foreign journalists after two Russian missiles struck a Kharkiv hotel late on Wednesday, local authorities said.
Sergiy Tomilenko, president of Ukraine’s national union of journalists, said today that Russian missile strikes which struck a hotel in Kharkiv amounted to “the intimidation of media workers in order to limit the coverage of the war”.
Top defence officials from Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania signed a memorandum of understanding in Istanbul establishing the Mine Countermeasures Naval Group in the Black Sea (MCM Black Sea), which will oversee de-mining operations in the Black Sea to ensure safe waters after Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Pro-war Russian leftwing activist, Sergei Udaltsov was questioned over terrorism offence, says his lawyer.
Russia’s Belgorod region bordering Ukraine is going through “hard times” due to recent fatal shelling by Kyiv, its governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said at an expo in Moscow on Thursday.
Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chair of Russia’s security council and a senior ally of Putin warned on Thursday that any Ukrainian attacks on missile launch sites inside Russia with arms supplied by the US and its allies would risk a nuclear response from Moscow.
The World Bank’s private investment arm has mobilised nearly $1bn to rebuild Ukraine’s private sector and is shifting its broader investment focus towards equity.
Ukraine is effectively a test site for North Korean nuclear missiles because Kim Jong-un’s regime is supplying Russia with rockets that can deliver an atomic bomb, South Korea has said.
Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, who are vying for the Republican presidential nomination in the US, were split over continuing support for Ukraine’s defence in a debate on Wednesday night. DeSantis suggested it was not a top US priority and accused Haley of wanting an “open-ended commitment” of US money and arms. Haley cast supporting Ukraine and stopping Russia’s aggression as a vital US priority. “You do not have to choose” between priorities like the US-Mexico border and Ukraine, she said. “This is about keeping America safe. This is about preventing war.”
The Kremlin has accused the US of trying to pressure European countries into backing the seizure of frozen Russian assets to help finance the rebuilding of Ukraine. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov was responding to a Bloomberg report published on Wednesday.
Neo-Nazis in the US no longer see backing Ukraine as a worthy cause. Two years into the war in Ukraine, once a destination for American extremists, many within the underground far-right movement in the US are avidly disavowing it and advising followers to stay away.
Ukraine has been building barricades and digging trenches as the country’s focus shifts towards defence. On Wednesday, Reuters reporters visited trenches being dug with an excavator and shovels at an undisclosed location in the Chernihiv region near the Russian border.
Updated
The EU needs to increase its annual defence budget tenfold if it is to secure its future against future threats from Russia and elsewhere, the European commissioner responsible for the internal market and critical raw materials has said.
Thierry Breton said the EU was already alive to the needs generated by Russia’s war on Ukraine but also had to be mindful of a potential weakening of US support for defence in Europe, which started with Barack Obama and was hardened by the last Trump administration.
“We just have to make sure we are prepared for all eventualities. Russia is one of our biggest concerns,” he said arguing Europe’s ammunition supplies has to be “on a par” with Russia.
“We need to enhance drastically our capacity … this is something I am pushing really hard,” he said. His remarks come two days after he revealed that Trump had told EU leaders in 2020 that the US would “never come help” if Europe was attacked.
Breton told reporters he shared the anecdote with members of the European parliament as one of two “triggers” to get member states thinking seriously about a change in approach to defence on the continent. The first trigger was Ukraine, the second was the prospect of Trump returning to the White House.
“He [Trump] was very vocal in the way he saw Europe, the way he saw Nato continuing, but of course he said it many times publicly, and that was part of the wake-up call for many member states,” Breton told reporters. “We probably need to handle more and more defence and security on our own. Of course we [are part of] Nato but if the biggest partner of the alliance had this view, we needed to take this into consideration,” he added.
“But to be honest, it started before Trump, you remember when Obama was in office and came to Brussels and made a statement … it was not the same warning as Trump but the trend was started here,” he added.
He also told reporters that the EU was “close” to achieving its target of producing 1m ammunition rounds a year for Ukraine and other uses. But he warned that some member states were not doing enough to get their factories to divert supplies going to other countries to home stockpiles.
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