At least five people were killed in a series of Russian and Ukrainian strikes on Friday, including an afternoon Russian missile attack on the Ukrainian city of Chernigiv which left at least one person dead and damaged a residential area, officials said. “Several houses were heavily damaged. There are wounded,” regional governor Vyacheslav Chaus said. “Search and rescue operations are ongoing.” Loud explosions were heard in the city, located to the north of the capital, Kyiv, about 75km (46 miles) from the Russian border. The city head said four had been wounded in the strikes, according to initial reports. Separate Russian bombardments on Friday killed a truck driver near Kyiv and a pensioner in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, local officials said. Four were hurt when the town of Sloviansk was shelled near the frontline in the Donetsk region, officials said. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said on Telegram that in the first three days of 2025 Russia had launched 300 attack drones and nearly 20 missiles on Ukrainian targets. Most, he said, had been downed or intercepted.
Ukrainian attacks on Russian border areas killed two people, according to local governors. One was killed by a mortar strike on a village in the Bryansk region, officials said. Near the frontlines in the Kursk region, where Ukraine launched an offensive last August, a man walking down a road was killed in a drone strike, the regional governor said. Moscow and Kyiv have escalated their aerial campaigns through the first weeks of winter in what has been seen as an attempt to gain the upper hand ahead of US president-elect Donald Trump taking office later in January.
The US expects to make announcements about additional security assistance for Ukraine in coming days, White House spokesperson John Kirby said on Friday. He said future announcements were expected, without providing specifics, after Washington last week announced $5.9bn in additional military and budget assistance for Ukraine and that a meeting of the Ukraine defence contact group in Germany would be held on 9 January.
Russia’s Pulkovo airport in St Petersburg temporarily halted flight arrivals and departures from for about two and a half hours on Saturday morning to ensure the safety of civilian aircraft, Russia’s aviation watchdog Rosaviatsia said. It did not specify a reason for the halt, but Russian airports have previously closed when there is a risk of Ukrainian drone strikes in the area. The governor of the northern Leningrad region containing St Petersburg, Alexander Drozdenko, said Russian forces had shot down two drones near Luga Bay in the gulf of Finland.
The breakaway Moldovan region of Transnistria ordered rolling blackouts on Friday as a halt in Russian gas supplies earlier this week plunged the self-proclaimed state into crisis. The breakaway region bordering Ukraine has been unable to provide heating and hot water to its residents since Wednesday, when Moscow cut off gas supplies to Moldova over a financial dispute. “In Transnistria today, 3 January, there will be rolling blackouts. This is because inhabitants of the republic are currently consuming more electricity than is produced by the energy system,” Transnistria’s economy ministry said on Telegram. Parts of Transnistria’s largest city, Tiraspol – including a neighbourhood home to a maternity hospital – would lose power, as well as smaller towns and villages, it said.
Oil from two ageing and damaged Russian tankers was detected on Friday off the coast of Sevastopol, the largest city in Moscow-annexed Crimea, a local official said. The Volgoneft-212 and the Volgoneft-239 were hit by a storm last month in the Kerch strait linking Crimea to the southern Russian Krasnodar region, about 250km from Sevastopol. One sank and the other ran aground, pouring about 2,400 tonnes of a heavy fuel oil called mazut into the surrounding waters, Russia’s transport ministry said. “A small oil slick reached Sevastopol today,” the Moscow-installed head of the city, Mikhail Razvozhayev, said on Telegram, publishing a video of the oil. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has called the tanker spills an “ecological disaster”.
