Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of the office of president of Ukraine, has posted to Telegram to report that the Zakarpattia oblast is working with Ukraine’s ice hockey federation to provide three new rinks, in response to the one destroyed in Druzhkivka in Donetsk on Monday. Tymoshenko writes:
In the communities where they will operate, they will create a youth centre with ice hockey departments. They will provide recruitment and a professional training process.
Local children will train here, as well as children who were forced to move from their hometowns and towns due to the war. We will not give the enemy a chance to take the future away from our children. We fight and fight precisely for them. Instead of one destroyed arena, there will be three!
The ice arena destroyed by a missile strike in Druzhkivka earlier this week. Photograph: Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters
Tass is reporting that the mayor of Horlivka, one of the Russian-occupied cities in Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, has said that the armed forces of Ukraine fired at the city, and hits were recorded on the buildings of a hostel and a medical unit.
Earlier today, Pavlo Kyrylenko, Ukraine’s governor of Donetsk oblast – one of the regions which the Russian Federation claims to have annexed – reported two people killed in the direction of Horlivka by Russian fire.
Neither sets of claims have been independently verified.
Andriy Yermak, the head of the Ukrainian president’s office, said he spoke with the White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, about “further coordination in the matter of guaranteeing Ukrainian energy security”.
In a tweet, Yermak said he thanked Sullivan for Washington’s support for Kyiv in its “struggle for independence, freedom, and democratic values”.
Had a phone call with the 🇺🇸 President's National Security Advisor @JakeSullivan46.
Discussed further coordination in the matter of guaranteeing 🇺🇦energy security. Thanked for supporting 🇺🇦 in our struggle for independence, freedom, and democratic values. pic.twitter.com/xUyrImPzCj
Three family members killed in Russian shelling in Kherson, says Ukrainian official
A couple and their 12-year-old son were killed today when a Russian shell hit a residential building in the town of Beryslav in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, a Ukrainian official has said.
The family was preparing to celebrate the Orthodox Christian Christmas when the attack took place, according to Kyrylo Tymoshenko, an aide to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, on his Telegram account.
Tymoshenko said:
People were preparing to celebrate Christmas together, but a cynical blow by the Russians killed them in their own home.
It has not been possible to independently verify this report.
Here’s more on the head of the private Russian military group Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who today bade farewell to former convicts who had served out their contracts in Ukraine, as my colleague Pjotr Sauer reported earlier.
The Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov writes that Russian commentators are beginning to joke that Prigozhin is the country’s real leader.
Russian commentators are beginning to joke that the name of the real Russian president starts with P and ends with N, but ain’t Putin. Prigozhin is certainly all over the state media, castigating governors and generals, and essentially demanding Gerasimov’s ouster. https://t.co/DJaYdkv2fO
The Wagner founder has previously criticised the Russian defence ministry for its performance in Ukraine and has lauded Wagner as the country’s most capable fighting force.
In a video published at the end of December and purportedly filmed near the city of Bakhmut in the Donetsk region, two apparent Wagner soldiers are seen insulting the chief of general staff, Valery Gerasimov.
The Guardian could not independently verify the footage, but when asked about the video by Russian journalists, Prigozhin appeared to express his approval for the actions of the soldiers, saying he travelled to Bakhmut to meet them.
“The guys asked me to convey that when you sit in a warm office, the problems of the frontline are hard to hear,” Prigozhin said in a statement, in an apparent dig at the country’s top military command.
Germany will always adjust its arms deliveries to Ukraine based on “the needs on the battlefield”, vice-chancellor Robert Habeck said.
Habeck said:
We will not stop to deliver weapons to Ukraine ... We will always adjust our deliveries to the need of the battlefield.
His remarks came a day after France’s Emmanuel Macron told President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that his government would send light AMX-10 RC armoured combat vehicles to help in the war against Russia.
In a phone call between the two leaders, Zelenskiy thanked Macron for the announcement and said it showed the need for others to provide heavier weapons, according to a French official.
Putin tells Erdoğan Ukraine must accept ‘new territorial realities’
Vladimir Putin told his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, that Russia was open to dialogue over Ukraine but that Kyiv would have to accept the “new territorial realities”, according to a readout of the call by the Kremlin.
In a statement, it said:
Vladimir Putin reaffirmed Russia’s openness to a serious dialogue, provided that the [Kyiv] authorities fulfil the well-known and repeatedly voiced requirements and take into account the new territorial realities.
Russia’s president annexed Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions in September after Kremlin-orchestrated fake referendums in the regions.
The Kremlin has previously insisted that any proposals to end the conflict in Ukraine must take into account what it calls “today’s realities” of those four Ukrainian regions having joined Russia. Russia does not fully control any of the four regions.
Putin also “acknowledged the destructive role of the West, pumping weapons into Kyiv, providing information and guidance,” the Kremlin said.
The pair also discussed a number of energy issues, including the creation of a gas hub in Turkey and the construction of the Akkuyu nuclear power plant, it added.
First Wagner prison recruits pardoned after fighting in Ukraine
Pjotr Sauer
The first inmates recruited by the private military group Wagner have received their promised pardons after fighting for six months in Ukraine, Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin told journalists on Thursday.
“They worked off their contract. They worked with honour, with dignity. They were the first ones. Nobody else in this world works as hard as they did,” Prigozhin told Russian news agency RIA-Novosti, standing alongside a number of former convicts.
Addressing the former prisoners, Prigozhin instructed them not to end up back in jail.
“The police will treat you with respect now… Don’t drink a lot, don’t use drugs, and don’t rape women, only [have sex] for love or money,” he said, a statement which was met with laughter.
“Don’t steal, you have enough money for now,” Prigozhin added.
“Don’t drink a lot, don’t use drugs, and don’t rape women, only [have sex] for love or money," Prigozhin tells a group of recently pardoned convicts who served six months with Wagner in Ukraine. “Don’t steal, you have enough money for now” pic.twitter.com/ha35GvUETu
Since last summer Prigozhin, known as “Putin’s chef” because his catering business hosted dinners attended by the Russian president, has recruited tens of thousands of prisoners to compensate for acute shortages of personnel on the battlefield. Each convict reportedly received up to £3,000 a month for fighting in Wagner.
In one leaked video, Prigozhin is seen visiting one of the prisons, telling inmates they would be freed if they served six months with his group.
According to Olga Romanova, the head of Russia Behind Bars, a prisoners’ rights NGO, around 40,000 convicts have so far been recruited from Russian prisons across the country to fight in Ukraine. She said many of them have perished fighting as part of Russia’s attempt to capture the Donbas city of Bakhmut.
Prigozhin’s practice of recruiting and pardoning prisoners has been described as “completely illegal and unconstitutional” by Romanova and other human rights workers.
There have also been reports of Wagner prisoners executed by their commanders for desertion.
In November, Prigozhin welcomed the brutal murder of Yevgeny Nuzhin, a convicted murderer recruited by Wagner who surrendered to Ukrainian forces but was later allegedly handed over to Russia.
Prigozhin issued a statement saying the clip showing Nuzhin executed by a sledgehammer blow to the head should be called “a dog receives a dog’s death”.
A wide-ranging public discussion is taking place in Ukraine over what to do with seven street murals painted in November by the British artist Banksy on a series of destroyed buildings in and around Kyiv.
The conversation has grown urgent after thieves last month made off with one artwork from the town of Hostomel, about 15 miles (25km) outside the capital. It shows a woman in a gas mask and dressing gown holding a red fire extinguisher. She is standing next to a real flame-blackened window.
Graffito left by Banksy in Borodianka in Kyiv region, Ukraine. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Banksy painted the image and six others during an unpublicised trip to Ukraine. He later acknowledged in a video that they were his work, done “in solidarity” with the Ukrainian people. The Instagram post showed the artist at work – his identity obscured – as well as interviews with local people walking amid ruins.
On 2 December, a group of men chiselled the dressing gown woman from the side of a scorched wall. When challenged by a local person, they claimed to be representatives of Neo-Eco, a French charity which is reconstructing the wrecked Hostomel housing estate using recycled materials.
Suspicious, the person rang the police. Officers arrived at the scene and arrested eight men. The mural was recovered in good condition and is now being kept under guard at Hostomel’s police station. An investigation into the crime has been opened.
Patriarch Kirill of Moscow has called for a ceasefire and a Christmas truce in Ukraine. In a statement posted to the church’s website, Kirill said he appealed to “all parties involved in the internecine conflict” for the ceasefire, so that “Orthodox people can attend services on Christmas Eve and the day of the Nativity of Christ”. The patriarch has faced stern external criticism for his support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Ukraine’s gross domestic product fell by 30.4% in 2022 – the largest annual fall in over 30 years – because of the war with Russia, the economy minister Yulia Svyrydenko said this morning. Svyrydenko said in a statement that Ukraine’s economy had suffered its largest losses since it won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 although the fall was less than initially expected.
The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, told Vladimir Putin in a phone call that peace efforts in the Russia-Ukraine war should be supported by a unilateral ceasefire and a “vision for a fair solution”, the Turkish presidency said on Thursday.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, Ukraine’s governor of Donetsk oblast – one of the regions which the Russian Federation claims to have annexed – has posted a status update in which he says two people have been killed by Russian fire in the last 24 hours.
Overnight, Denis Pushilin, head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), has said that service personnel injured in the attack on the barracks in occupied Makiivka have been mostly transferred to hospitals within Russia.
The US is looking at ways to target Iranian drone production through sanctions and export controls, the White House said. Washington previously imposed sanctions on companies and people it accused of producing or transferring Iranian drones that Russia has used against Ukraine.
The United States is not “hand-wringing” over the mass casualties of Russian soldiers in a Ukrainian attack reportedly using US-supplied artillery, a senior White House official said Wednesday. After criticism in Russia over the use of US-delivered weaponry by Ukrainian defenders, including in the Makiivka strike, the national security council spokesperson John Kirby said Russia is to blame.
Heavy fighting around the largely ruined, Ukrainian-held city of Bakhmut is likely to persist for the foreseeable future, with the outcome uncertain as Russians have made incremental progress, according to a senior US administration official.
The Ukrainian deputy defence minister said significant Russian losses meant Moscow would probably have to announce a second partial mobilisation in the first quarter of the year.
Ukraine’s efforts to increase exports under the Black Sea grain deal with Russia are focused on securing faster inspections of ships rather than including more ports in the initiative, a senior Ukrainian official said on Wednesday.
That is it from me, Martin Belam, for now. I will be back later. Léonie Chao-Fong will be with you for the next few hours.
