NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 19:58
Russia fired a record number of drones into Ukraine last night, the Ukrainian military reports. This would involve 90 Shahed drones, of which the Ukrainian anti-aircraft defense managed to intercept 87. According to the Ukrainian army, the attacks targeted port infrastructure and residential areas. A 15-year-old teenager was killed and seven people were injured in the port city of Odesa, authorities in the region said.
Also during the day, Russia attacked several Ukrainian cities with drones. At least five people were killed in the cities of Odesa, Kharkiv and Kherson and the Sumy region.
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AFP
A museum in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv was completely destroyed
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EPA
Damage to an apartment complex in the Ukrainian port city of Odesa after a drone attack
Russia will further intensify attacks on Ukraine, Putin said today during a visit to a military hospital in Moscow. He called the attacks on the Russian border town of Belgorod a “terrorist act” by Ukraine and warned that Russia would not let them go unpunished.
Russian authorities reported this last Saturday At least 22 people had been killed by Ukrainian shelling in the southern Russian border town of Belgorod. More than a hundred others were injured. According to the local governor, the death toll has risen to 25 today. Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for the attack on the Russian city. A source in the Ukrainian security service told the BBC that the target of the attacks was military infrastructure, but that many casualties in Belgorod were caused by “defective Russian anti-aircraft defenses”.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Podalyak calls the Russian claims completely hypocritical in a statement X. “These statements are made after the firing of 122 missiles at the centers of major Ukrainian cities on New Year’s Eve and the launching of almost 90 drones on New Year’s night. All this was aimed at one fundamental Russian goal: to kill as many citizens of another as possible country, the citizens of Ukraine,” the advisor wrote.
“No crime against our civilian population goes unpunished,” Putin vowed. He did not mention how, a day before the attacks on Belgorod, dozens of people were killed and more than 150 injured in Ukraine by a large-scale Russian air strike on the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Odesa and Zaporizhia. Ukrainian authorities spoke of the heaviest airstrikes since Russia invaded the country in February 2022.
Putin promised retaliation for the attack on Belgorod, but said Russia will only attack military infrastructure and not civilians; Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, at least 10,000 Ukrainian civilians had been killed by November last year, according to the United Nations Human Rights Council. The UN Human Rights Mission in Ukraine said it expects the actual number to be considerably higher.
New Year’s speeches
Ukrainian President Zelensky also spoke about retaliation in his New Year’s speech around midnight. “Next year the enemy will feel the vengeance of domestic production,” Zelensky said. He reiterated his earlier promise that Ukraine will produce at least a million drones next year.
The president also thanked international partners for their supplies of weapons. “Our pilots have already mastered the F-16 fighter jets and we will definitely see them in our airspace. So that our enemies can see what our real wrath is,” Zelensky said.
Putin himself also gave his traditional New Year’s speech, but only superficially discussed the war with Ukraine. “Ukraine” or the “special military operation”, as Putin calls the war, were not mentioned. This also applied to military losses and the uprising of the Russian mercenary organization Wagner in the middle of last year.
2024-01-01 18:58:06
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