Ukraine president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in his New Year address early on Monday said Ukraine had become stronger in overcoming serious difficulties as the war against Russia moves toward its second year. He said the war had taught Ukrainians to withstand Russian attacks and adapt to hardships, including blackouts, the operation of industry and threats to shipping its exports. “The major result of the year, its main achievement: Ukraine has become stronger. Ukrainians have become stronger,” Zelenskiy said in the address.
Zelenskiy pointed to Ukrainian successes in containing and attacking Russia’s navy in the Black Sea, confirmed “by their large landing ships, missile-armed and patrol corvettes on the bottom of the sea.”
Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has spoken of his country’s “united society”, hailing Russian soldiers as heroes while making only a passing reference to the war in Ukraine in his New Year address. Putin described 2024 as the “year of the family”.
Ukraine’s air force said that Russia launched a new overnight air attack, targeting Mykolaiv, Odesa and Dnipro regions.
Ukraine’s shelling of the city of Donetsk early on New Year’s Day killed three people, a Russian-installed official in the eastern region of Ukraine said.
Russia had also launched a bombardment on Ukrainian regions in the hours leading into New Year’s Eve, targeting Kyiv and inflicting damage on residential areas of the city of Kharkiv, Ukrainian officials said.
The Kharkiv mayor, Ihor Terekhov, said the drone attack came in several waves, hitting residential buildings in the city centre and starting fires. “All relevant emergency services are already on the site. Information about potential casualties is being clarified.”
The death toll from a Ukrainian rocket attack on the Russian city of Belgorod just north of Ukraine rose to 24 on Sunday, the governor of the Belgorod region said. Russian officials said 110 were wounded. The Guardian has not been able to independently verify Russian reports.
Ukrainian officials said that two boys aged 14 and 16 and a security adviser for a team of German journalists were among those injured in Kharkiv.
Russia’s defence ministry said it hit “decision-making centres” and military facilities in Kharkiv in response to the shelling of Belgorod.
Ukraine has denied Russia’s claims that a missile strike on a Kharkiv hotel killed Ukrainian intelligence officers and military “involved in the planning and execution of the attack on the city of Belgorod”.
A Ukrainian security source told the BBC that casualties in Belgorod were the result of “incompetent work of Russian air defence”, suggesting debris from failed Russian interceptors fell on the city. The Guardian could not independently verify the claim.
Ukraine’s military destroyed 21 out of 49 attack drones launched by Russia in its latest overnight airstrike, Kyiv’s air force said on Sunday.
China’s president, Xi Jinping, said on Sunday that the foundation of Chinese-Russian ties had grown stronger in 2023, as he exchanged New Year greetings with his counterpart Putin, state media reported.
In an intelligence briefing, the MoD said the average daily number of Russian casualties (killed and wounded) had risen by almost 300 a day compared with 2022. “The increase in daily averages, as reported by the Ukrainian authorities, almost certainly reflects the degradation of Russia’s forces and its transition to a lower quality, high quantity mass army since the ‘partial mobilisation’ of reservists in September 2022.”
Russia has lost 359,230 combat personnel since its invasion of Ukraine last year, according to the general staff of the Ukrainian armed forces. A further 5,977 tanks and 11,070 armoured combat vehicles have been lost.
Ukrainian MP Lesia Vasylenko has said Russia is “targeting and hitting civilian buildings”, after the fresh bombardment on Ukrainian regions.
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Russian courts have sentenced more than 200 Ukrainian fighters to “long” prison terms since the beginning of the conflict, Moscow’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said in an interview with the state-run RIA news agency reported.
Reuters, Agence France-Presse and Associated Press contributed to this report.
