Key events
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24016604/VRG_Illo_HT007_K_Radtke_Pixel_03__1_.jpg){kind=tracking}
