Summary
Here the latest developments of the Russia-Ukraine war at a glance:
Russian forces have gained full control of Maryinka, a town in eastern Ukraine, news agencies cited the Russian defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, as saying on Monday.
Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has been located at a penal colony in the Arctic Yamal-Nenets region of northern Russia, his spokesperson Kira Yarmysh has confirmed.
Russia launched 31 drones and two missiles at Ukraine overnight, mostly targeting the south of the country, with air defences destroying 28 drones and both missiles, the Ukrainian military reported on Monday.
Russia on Monday accused Western countries of stirring up tensions in Moscow-friendly Serbia, which has been rocked by protests over alleged fraud in elections held on 17 December.
Russia said on Monday that emergency workers had put out a fire on a Soviet-era nuclear-powered cargo-icebreaker ship and the state company which runs the vessel said there had been no casualties and no threat to the security of the reactor.
Serhiy Lysak, the governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region, said five Russian UAVs over the region were “destroyed” by Ukrainian forces late yesterday evening.
The members of the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union have signed a free trade agreement with Iran, Russian news agency Tass has reported.
Ukraine said on Monday it had shot down 28 Russian drones out of 31 launched from the annexed Crimea peninsula.
The Armenian prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, will pay a two-day visit to Russia, after skipping a summit in Kyrgyzstan Putin attended in October.
Russian attacks on southern Ukraine’s Kherson region killed five civilians on Sunday, Ukrainian officials said.
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Russian forces have gained full control of Maryinka, a town in eastern Ukraine, news agencies cited the Russian defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, as saying on Monday.
Most accounts of Maryinka, south-west of the Russian-held regional centre of Donetsk, describe it as a ghost town after once being home to 10,000 people, Reuters reports.
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Here is a bit more detail on Putin critic Alexei Navalny, who is serving a 19-year sentence on charges of extremism, from the Associated Press:
He had been imprisoned in the Vladimir region of central Russia, about 230 kilometers (140 miles) east of Moscow, but his lawyers said they had not been able to reach him since Dec. 6.
His spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh, said on X, formerly Twitter, that he was located in a prison colony in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenetsk region about 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow.
Navalny is “doing well” and a lawyer visited him, Yarmysh said.
The region is notorious for long and severe winters; the town is near Vorkuta, whose coal mines were among the harshest of the Soviet Gulag prison-camp system.
“It is almost impossible to get to this colony; it is almost impossible to even send letters there. This is the highest possible level of isolation from the world,” Navalny’s chief strategist, Leonid Volkov, said on X.
Transfers within Russia’s prison system are shrouded in secrecy and inmates can disappear from contact for several weeks. Navalny’s team was particularly alarmed when he could not be found because he had been ill and reportedly was being denied food and kept in an unventilated cell.
Navalny has been behind bars in Russia since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. Before his arrest, he campaigned against official corruption and organized major anti-Kremlin protests.
He has since received three prison terms and spent months in isolation in Penal Colony No. 6 for alleged minor infractions. He has rejected all charges against him as politically motivated.
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Alexei Navalny’s whereabouts confirmed after going ‘missing’ for weeks
Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny is in a penal colony in the Arctic Yamal-Nenets region of northern Russia, his spokesperson Kira Yarmysh has confirmed.
Navalny’s lawyer managed to see him on Monday, Yarmysh was quoted as saying by Reuters.
On Saturday, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, expressed concern about Navalny’s whereabouts as he had been missing in Russia’s prison system for nearly three weeks.
Navalny, an anti-corruption activist who became a leading opponent of Vladimir Putin, was convicted of extremism and other charges and is due to remain in prison for three decades.
He has called the charges against him politically motivated and said he believes he will not be released while Putin is alive.
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Serhiy Lysak, the governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region, has posted to Telegram saying five Russian UAVs over the region were “destroyed” by Ukrainian forces late yesterday evening.
The members of the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union have signed a free trade agreement with Iran, Russian news agency Tass has reported.
The agreement will become permanent and replace a similar temporary pact in force since 2019, according to Reuters.
My colleague Pjotr Sauer reports on Russian women-led movements challenging the official narrative that mobilised troops are required for war against Ukraine.
“We want a total demobilisation. Civilians should not be engaged in the fighting,” says one of the women at the start of the nine-minute address this month. “There are many of us, and our numbers will only grow.”
They are the wives and mothers of some of the 300,000 Russian men who were conscripted in September 2022, at a critical period for the Kremlin when it needed to shore up its troop numbers after Ukraine recaptured swathes of territory in the south and north of the country.
Full story here:
Ukraine said on Monday it had shot down 28 Russian drones out of 31 launched from the annexed Crimea peninsula, AFP reports.
“On December 25, the enemy attacked with 31 attacking UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] … 28 Shahed-136/131 drones were shot down,” the air force said on social media.
The air force said it had also shot down two Russian missiles and two fighter jets, one over the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine and one over the Black Sea.
The defence forces in southern Ukraine said 17 of the downed drones were in the southern Odesa region and five more in other parts of the south.
In Odesa, the defence forces said port infrastructure had been damaged but there were no casualties.
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Russia on Monday accused Western countries of stirring up tensions in Moscow-friendly Serbia, which has been rocked by protests over alleged fraud in elections held on 17 December.
Just a day before, demonstrators tried to storm the city hall of the Serbian capital, Belgrade. Protesters reject the results of parliamentary and local elections in which president Aleksandar Vučić’s party said it secured a commanding victory, which had been welcomed by the Kremlin.
The Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Moscow hoped the result would lead to the “further strengthening of friendship” between the countries.
“The attempts of the collective West to destabilise the situation in the country are obvious,” the foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova told the state-run news agency RIA Novosti.
Belgrade did not join international sanctions against Moscow for its Ukraine offensive, but Serbia has condemned Russia’s aggression at the UN and its support has caused controversy.
Serbia is almost entirely dependent on Russian gas, AFP reports.
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The Armenian prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, will pay a two-day visit to Russia, the RIA Novosti news agency quoted the Armenian government’s press service as saying on Monday.
Pashinyan will take part in a meeting of the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council on 25 December, and the next day will participate in an informal meeting of heads of state of the Commonwealth of Independent States, RIA Novosti reported.
In October, Pashinyan skipped a summit in Kyrgyzstan attended by Vladimir Putin and the leaders of Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, amid a growing rift between Yerevan and Moscow.
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Russia said on Monday that emergency workers had put out a fire on a Soviet-era nuclear-powered cargo-icebreaker ship and the state company which runs the vessel said there had been no casualties and no threat to the security of the reactor.
The fire broke out on Sunday in one of the cabins of the Soviet-made Sevmorput ship, which is docked in the northern Russian city of Murmansk, the emergency ministry said.
The fire, which at its peak covered an area of about 30 square metres (323 square feet), was put out with no casualties, the ministry said.
“The fire was quickly liquidated,” Atomflot, which owns the vessel, said in a statement.
“There were no injuries. There was no threat to crucial support systems or to the reactor plant,” Atomflot said.
Atomflot runs Russia’s fleet of nuclear icebreakers and is a unit of the Rosatom state nuclear corporation, Reuters reports.
The Murmansk region, in Russia’s north-west, shares borders with Finland and Norway, as well as with the Barents and White seas.
The ship, which entered service in 1988 and went through an extensive upgrade a decade ago, is Russia’s only nuclear-powered icebreaking transport ship, according to Rosatom.
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Russia launched 31 drones and two missiles at Ukraine overnight, mostly targeting the south of the country, with air defences destroying 28 drones and both missiles, the Ukrainian military reported on Monday.
“As a result of air combat, the Ukrainian Air Force and defence forces destroyed 28 Shahed attack drones in Odesa, Kherson, Mykolaiv, Donetsk, Kirovohrad and Khmelnytskyi regions,” Ukraine’s air force said on the Telegram messaging app.
The drones were launched from Russian-occupied Crimea, it said.
The military said debris from the downed drones had damaged technical facilities in the Odesa port as well as “an inoperable administrative building and a warehouse”.
In Kherson region, a fire broke out in a warehouse, the military said.
“No people were injured,” the military added, also repeating previously issued information that two Russian military aircraft were downed near the Russian-occupied city of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov in southern Ukraine and near the occupied Donetsk city in eastern Ukraine.
On Sunday, Russian and Ukrainian military officials both reported downing enemy aircraft in different areas of the 620-mile front of their 22-month-old war, Reuters reports, but could not independently verify the Ukrainian air force’s report. There was no immediate comment from Russia.
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Opening summary
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine.
“Evil will be defeated,” the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said in a Christmas Eve address to the nation, as the country’s Orthodox Christians prepare to mark Christmas Day on 25 December for the first time.
“Today, all Ukrainians are together,” the president said in his nightly address. “We all meet Christmas together. On the same date, as one big family, as one nation, as one united country. And today our common prayer will be stronger than ever … And it will resonate today without a time difference of two weeks. Resonate together with Europe and the world.”
The government changed the date of Orthodox Christmas from 7 January to 25 December in a symbolic shift away from the Russian Orthodox church.
In other developments:
Russian attacks on southern Ukraine’s Kherson region killed five civilians on Sunday, Ukrainian officials said. Regional police said three people died in shelling of an apartment building and a private home in Kherson city. A woman died in a drone attack in a small town south of Kherson and a second woman was killed when a town farther north came under heavy fire.
Ukrainian shelling killed one woman and wounded six civilians in the town of Horlivka, an area of Ukraine’s Donetsk region under Russian control, a Russian-installed official said. A shopping centre and several other buildings were destroyed, the mayor of Horlivka, Ivan Prikhodko, said on Telegram.
Polish farmers have ended their blockade of one of the border crossings between Ukraine and Poland and the movement of lorries has been fully restored, the Ukrainian border service has said. Drivers have been blocking several crossings with Ukraine since 6 November, demanding that the EU reinstate a system under which Ukrainian companies need permits to operate in the bloc, and the same for European truckers seeking to enter Ukraine.
Russian and Ukrainian military officials both reported downing enemy aircraft on Sunday in different areas of the 1,000-km-long (621-mile) front. The commander of Ukraine’s air force, Mykola Oleshchuk, said Ukrainian anti-aircraft units had struck a Russian Su-34 fighter bomber near the Russian-occupied city of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov in southern Ukraine. Oleshchuk, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said the aircraft had not returned to its base, but gave no further details.
Russia’s defence ministry said earlier that its air defence systems had shot down four Ukrainian military aircraft over the past 24 hours – just two days after Zelenskiy said Kyiv had downed three Russian aircraft. In its daily dispatch, the Russian defence ministry said its air defence shot down three Su-27 fighter aircraft and one Su-24 tactical bomber in the Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions of southeastern Ukraine. The dispatch provided no further details.
Hundreds of supporters of Igor Girkin, a jailed former commander of Russian-backed fighters in Ukraine, rallied in Moscow on Sunday to back his bid to stand for president. Better known by his alias Igor Strelkov, Girkin was a key leader of separatist fighters in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic in eastern Ukraine in 2014. The nationalist has strongly criticised Russia’s military strategy in Ukraine for being “too kind”. He was detained in July on an extremism charge after a series of posts critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is expected to easily win re-election.
Russia launched 15 drones at Ukraine, mostly in the south of the country, overnight with air defences destroying 14 of them, Ukrainian military said on Sunday. “As a result of air combat, Ukraine’s air force and defence forces destroyed 14 shaheds in Mykolaiv, Kirovohrad, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro and Khmelnytskyi regions,” the Ukrainian air force said on the Telegram messaging app.
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