It is just after 8pm in Kyiv, and that concludes today’s Ukraine blog. Thank you for reading along.
Kazakhstan has set up a yurt in Bucha – an area ouside of Kyiv that suffered a massacre last March – offering a space for residents to warm up and find food.
The Odesa Journal reports that the “Yurt of Invincibility” was supported by the citizens of Kazakhstan, the embassy of Kazakhstan in Ukraine and Sergei Nagornyak, chair of Ukraine’s group on interparliamentary relations with Kazakhstan.
The newspaper reports that six such yurts are due to be set up in cities across Ukraine.
It was previously reported that the killings in Bucha in March last year were part of a deliberate and systematic effort to ruthlessly secure a route to the capital, Kyiv.
The “Yurt of Invincibility” will serve as a heating point for the city’s residents during the blackout.
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Ukrainians released in prisoner swap
Around 50 Ukrainian soldiers who were released from Russian detention on Sunday as part of a prisoner swap posed for a photo on their release.
Another 50 Ukraine service members have been released from captivity via exchange procedure. pic.twitter.com/4frdDSUdXm
— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) January 8, 2023
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Summary
Here’s a roundup of the key developments of the day:
Russia and Belarus have expanded their joint military training exercises in Belarus, the country’s defence TV channel said on Sunday, as concern grows that Moscow is pressuring its closest ally to join the war in Ukraine.
One person was killed as a result of the attack on the Starobesheve power plant in Novyi Svit, Russia’s state Tass news agency said on Sunday. The thermal power plant was one of two in part of Ukraine’s Donetsk region that is controlled by Russian forces that were damaged in a rocket attack by the Ukrainian army, Moscow-installed officials said.
Officials said at least two people were killed during fighting in eastern Ukraine, AP reports. Donetsk governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said one person was killed in strikes on Bakhmut, and eight others in the region were wounded. He also reported rocket attacks on Kramatorsk and Konstantynivka.
Moscow claimed on Sunday to have killed 600 soldiers in a strike on the eastern town of Kramatorsk, near the frontline in Bakhmut. But the town’s mayor said there had been no deaths from strikes over the weekend, and the Russian claim seems suspicious for several reasons.
Demands for a special tribunal to investigate Russia for a “crime of aggression” against Ukraine have been backed by senior UK politicians from across the political divide in a move to show Vladimir Putin and his generals that they will be held to account.
Russian attacks were reported on Saturday in at least seven regions in Ukraine’s east and south over the previous 24 hours, despite Moscow’s ceasefire declaration for Orthodox Christmas. At least three people were killed.
Russian troops shelled the Kherson region 39 times on Friday, according to the governor, Yaroslav Yanushevych. Residential buildings and a fire station building came under fire in the liberated city of Kherson, where a first responder was killed. Seven civilians were also wounded in the region.
Ukraine’s military said two were killed and 13 injured in Russia’s shelling of Bakhmut, eastern Ukraine, during the purported ceasefire. The two dead were a 66-year-old man and 61-year-old woman.
Russian troops were “terrorising” civilians in the north-eastern region of Kharkiv, said its governor, Oleh Syniehubov. No casualties have been reported, but residential and commercial buildings continued to come under fire.
Russian forces shelled Ukrainian positions 14 times and stormed one settlement three times in the frontline eastern Luhansk province in the first three hours of the purported ceasefire, said its governor, Serhiy Haidai, Reuters reported. It heard explosions of what Ukrainian troops at the frontline described as incoming Russian rocket fire. Ukrainians fired back from tanks.
The Russian-installed governor of the occupied Crimean city of Sevastopol has said air defences shot down a drone in an apparent attack on the port where Russia’s Black Sea fleet is based. Mikhail Razvozhaev alleged that the incident took place early on Saturday.
The UK Ministry of Defence said fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces continued at a “routine level” into the Orthodox Christmas period. The ministry’s daily intelligence update stated that fighting was focused in heavily forested terrain to the west of the town of Kremina in eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk province, where “combat has devolved to dismounted infantry fighting, often at short range”.
The US has asked Italy to provide air defence systems to Ukraine as soon as possible. The Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported that the request was made in a conversation between the US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and Francesco Talo, an adviser to the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.
I’m logging off for the day now and handing over to my colleague Allan Glen. Thanks so much for joining me today.
Updated
Russia and Belarus have expanded their joint military training exercises in Belarus, the country’s defence TV channel said on Sunday, as concern grows that Moscow is pressuring its closest ally to join the war in Ukraine.
The two countries added weapons, soldiers and specialised equipment to the exercises and are doing drills drawing on Russian experience in Ukraine, Reuters reported.
On Friday the Belarusian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, visited a military base where Russian troops are stationed to meet troops and discuss the joint military drills.
Unofficial Telegram channels monitoring military activity in Belarus reported that between 1,400 and 1,600 Russian troops arrived in the city of Vitebsk, in north-east Belarus, on Sunday. Reuters said it could not independently verify the information.
A unilateral, self-declared Russian ceasefire – announced for the Orthodox Christmas celebrations – drew to an end on Sunday but there had been little letup in fighting or civilian deaths during the period.
In the final hours when Russia was meant to be holding off fire, at least two people were killed by shelling, one in northern Kharkiv and another in Soledar, eastern Donetsk, Ukrainian officials said.
Overnight temperatures are falling well below freezing across Ukraine, which could pave the way for more intense fighting as it becomes easier to move heavy machinery that would have become bogged down in autumn mud.
Read more here:
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A Russian rocket strike on the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk caused damage but did not destroy buildings and there were no obvious signs of casualties, a witness told Reuters on Sunday, after Russia said the attack killed 600 Ukrainian soldiers.
The ministry said the strike was revenge for Ukraine’s New Year’s Day attack that killed at least 89 Russian soldiers at a barracks in part of the Donetsk region controlled by Moscow’s forces.
Reuters reporters visited the two college dormitories Russia’s defence ministry said had been temporarily housing Ukrainian servicemen close to the front line of the war at the time of the overnight strike.
Neither appeared to have been directly hit by missiles or seriously damaged. There were no obvious signs that soldiers had been living there and no sign of bodies or traces of blood.
Officials said at least two people were killed during fighting in eastern Ukraine, AP reports.
Donetsk governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said one person was killed in strikes on Bakhmut, and eight others in the region were wounded. He also reported rocket attacks on Kramatorsk and Konstantynivka.
In the Kharkiv region, the town of Merefa was hit during the night, killing one person and two other settlements in the region were shelled, governor Oleh Syniehubov said.
The latest developments come after Russian forces ended a partially observed, unilateral cease-fire timed to coincide with Orthodox Christmas celebrations on Saturday.
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Kramatorsk mayor says no deaths from strikes, contradicting Russian claims
Moscow claimed on Sunday to have killed 600 soldiers in a strike on the eastern town of Kramatorsk, near the frontline in Bakhmut.
But the town’s mayor said there had been no deaths from strikes over the weekend, and the Russian claim seems suspicious for several reasons.
It comes just days after Ukraine killed hundreds of Russian fighters in an attack on a temporary barracks in the town of Makiivka, that was also used for storing ammunition.
It would be stupid for Ukrainian forces to gather in large numbers within range of artillery guns – the very mistake they exploited to kill so many of their enemy.
And on a recent trip to the frontline in Donetsk, near the site of the claimed strike, Guardian reporter Artem Mazhulin noted that Ukrainian soldiers were wary of clustering together. “They are all spread in smaller groups across various locations,” he said.
The huge death toll caused anger and outrage at home in Russia, so there would be a clear propaganda motive to claim that Russia had been able to retaliate in kind.
Within hours Russian news agency RIA had labelled it a “retaliation operation”, quoting the ministry of defence.
And finally, unlike in Russia, where the media is tightly controlled, Ukraine has been largely open to the media, and hosts a huge domestic and international press pack.
Even if the site of a deadly attack is kept off limits to individual reporters, every battlefield death and injury affects relatives and friends around the country.
Thousands would be grieving if hundreds had been killed, and it would be hard to cover up such a tragedy in a country with a free press.
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There has been no immediate comment from Ukraine on Russia’s claim it killed more than 600 Ukrainian servicemen in a rocket strike.
However, the mayor of Kramatorsk, the eastern Ukrainian town Russia said it had targeted, said earlier on Sunday via Facebook that nobody had been killed in an attack on various buildings in the city.
Russia’s defence ministry said in a statement that it had used what it called reliable intelligence to target the Ukrainian troops. It said more than 700 Ukrainian troops had been housed in one hostel and more than 600 in another.
“As a result of a massive missile strike on these temporary deployment points of Ukrainian army units, more than 600 Ukrainian servicemen were destroyed,” the defence ministry said.
If true, it would be the single largest loss of Ukrainian troops since Russia invaded on 24 February last year.
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Russia’s defence ministry said on Sunday it had killed more than 600 Ukrainian servicemen in a massive rocket strike on buildings in eastern Ukraine temporarily housing Ukrainian forces, Reuters reports.
It said the strike on Kramatorsk was revenge for Ukraine’s deadly attack earlier this year on a Russian barracks in Makiivka in part of the Donetsk region controlled by Moscow’s forces.
Reuters could not immediately verify the defence ministry’s assertion. We’ll update you when we have more on this.
Updated
One person was killed as a result of the attack on the Starobesheve power plant in Novyi Svit, Russia’s state Tass news agency said on Sunday.
The thermal power plant was one of two in part of Ukraine’s Donetsk region that is controlled by Russian forces that were damaged in a rocket attack by the Ukrainian army, Moscow-installed officials said.
Initial information suggested that the plants in Zuhres and Novyi Svit had been hit and that some people working there had sustained injuries, the officials said on their Telegram channels, Reuters reports.
A report from the Tass news agency said:
The body of one dead woman was extracted from under the rubble at the plant.
Tass had earlier said the strike was carried out using a multiple rocket launcher system.
There was no immediate comment from Ukraine, which never publicly claims responsibility for attacks inside Russia or on Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine.
Updated
There has been growing concerns that Belarus – a staunch backer of Moscow – could be used as a staging post to attack Ukraine from the north after increasing military activity in the country and fresh transfer of Russian troops there, Reuters reports.
Unofficial Telegram channels monitoring military activity in Belarus reported late on Saturday that some 1,400-1,600 Russian troops arrived from Russia into the north-eastern city of Vitebsk in Belarus over the past two days. Reuters was not able to independently verify the information.
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Wednesday that Russia is planning a major new offensive. The Pentagon said on Friday that Vladimir Putin’s aim of seizing Ukrainian territory has not changed, even if his military continues to suffer blows.
Following the self-declared ceasefire, the Kremlin said Moscow would press ahead with what it calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine, an invasion that it launched on 24 February last year and that Kyiv and its western allies call an unprovoked aggression to grab land.
The Russian state Tass agency quoted Putin’s first deputy chief of staff, Sergei Kiriyenko, as saying:
The tasks set by the president (Putin) for the special military operation will still be fulfilled.
And there definitely will be a victory.
Updated
Updated
Russia’s overnight bombing of regions in eastern Ukraine killed at least one, officials said on Sunday after Moscow ended a self-declared Christmas ceasefire and vowed to fight on until it defeats its neighbour.
Reuters has this report:
Two thermal power plants were damaged by Ukrainian shelling in Russian-controlled parts of the country’s Donetsk region with preliminary reports of injuries, Moscow-installed officials said on Sunday.
Serhiy Haidai, governor of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, said on TV on Sunday there was heavy fighting in the region and Russian forces had deployed their most combat-ready units and heavy equipment to the city of Kriminna that they occupy, which he said meant the Russians were slowly retreating in the region.
With nighttime temperatures dipping to minus 15-17 Celsius (5 to 1 Fahrenheit), fighting activity would soon increase as hard frosts mean it is easier to move heavy equipment, Haidai added.
Meanwhile, shellfire echoed around the near-deserted streets of the Ukrainian town of Bakhmut on Sunday, focus of the most intense fighting in Russia’s invasion. Reuters could not ascertain the origin of the shells heard in Bakhmut.
The Russian-installed governor of the Crimean city of Sevastopol said on Saturday air defences had shot down a drone in what he suggested was the latest attempted Ukrainian attack on a port where Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is based.
Demands for a special tribunal to investigate Russia for a “crime of aggression” against Ukraine have been backed by senior UK politicians from across the political divide in a move to show Vladimir Putin and his generals that they will be held to account.
In a joint statement shared with the Observer, figures including the Labour leader Keir Starmer, the former Nato secretary general George Robertson, the former foreign secretary David Owen, and former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith say the tribunal should be set up to look into the “manifestly illegal war” on the same principles that guided the allies when they met in 1941 to lay the groundwork for the Nuremberg war crimes trials of Nazi leaders.
While the International Criminal Court (ICC) is already looking at allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity in relation to the Ukraine invasion, advocates for a special tribunal say it is needed because the ICC does not have the power to examine the crime of aggression. The United Nations defines an act of aggression as the “invasion or attack by the armed forces of a state on the territory of another state, or any military occupation”.
A special tribunal would heap further pressure on Russia and Putin, its advocates say. It would stop senior Russian officials from travelling out of fear of arrest, show solidarity with Ukraine, which has requested the tribunal, and send a message from the international community that aggression will not go unpunished. It would also examine Belarus’s role.
They write:
It has been 10 months since Russia, backed by Belarus, launched one of the largest ground invasions in Europe since the second world war.
Since then, thousands of Ukrainian civilians have been killed or injured, 8 million people have been internally displaced and around 8 million have become refugees. Civilian infrastructure and economic assets worth tens of billions have been destroyed or plundered, and irreplaceable cultural monuments reduced to rubble.
If proven in court, these acts of aggression could constitute what the Nuremberg trials termed the ‘supreme international crime’. For it is the crime of aggression from which most other international crimes – war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide – often flow.
Read more here:
Welcome to today’s politics liveblog. I’m Nicola Slawson and I’m taking over from my colleague Adam. Do drop me a line if you have any questions or think I’ve missed anything. My email is nicola.slawson@theguardian.com and I’m @Nicola_Slawson on Twitter.
Ukrainians and Russians marked Orthodox Christmas on Saturday as the 36-hour ceasefire ordered by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin ran its course with little sign the fighting had eased.
Agence France-Presse reported that war-scarred cities in eastern Ukraine saw no significant let-up in the combat. Heavy artillery fire was heard in the town of Chasiv Yar, south of the frontline city of Bakhmut, throughout much of Saturday morning.
The Russian defence ministry insisted its forces were observing the unilateral ceasefire, which ended at 11pm in Kyiv (2100 GMT). But they also said they had repelled attacks in eastern Ukraine and killed dozens of Ukrainian soldiers on Friday.
Ukrainian authorities said only three people had been killed on Friday.
The two thermal power plants in Ukraine’s Donetsk region controlled by Russian forces were damaged in a rocket attack by the Ukrainian army, Moscow-installed officials and Russian state news agency Tass said on Sunday.
Reuters also reported that early information suggested the plants in Zuhres and Novyi Svit had been hit and that some people on the spot had sustained injuries, the officials said on their Telegram channels.
Two people might be trapped under debris at the damaged Starobesheve power plant in Novyi Svit, Tass reported. Citing officials, it said the strike was carried out using a multiple rocket launcher system.
There was no immediate comment from Ukraine, which never publicly claims responsibility for attacks inside Russia or on Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine.
Updated
Ukraine shelling damages two power plants in Donetsk, say officials
Reuters is reporting two thermal power plants were damaged by Ukrainian shelling in Russian-controlled parts of the country’s Donetsk region, according to Moscow-installed officials on Sunday.
Preliminary information indicated injuries in the shelling in Zuhres and Novyi Svit, the officials said on their Telegram monitoring channel.
Ukraine almost never publicly claims responsibility for attacks inside Russia or on Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine.
Updated
Opening summary
Welcome back to our continuing live coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war – I’m Adam Fulton.
Russia bombed regions in eastern Ukraine overnight, local officials said on Sunday, after Moscow ended its self-declared 36-hour ceasefire and vowed to push on with combat until it was victorious.
A 50-year-old man died in the Kharkiv region as a result of the Russian shelling, the regional governor, Oleh Sinehubov, said on the Telegram messaging app, Reuters reported.
In other developments:
Russian attacks were reported on Saturday in at least seven regions in Ukraine’s east and south over the previous 24 hours, despite Moscow’s ceasefire declaration for Orthodox Christmas. At least three people were killed.
Russian troops shelled the Kherson region 39 times on Friday, according to the governor, Yaroslav Yanushevych. Residential buildings and a fire station building came under fire in the liberated city of Kherson, where a first responder was killed. Seven civilians were also wounded in the reigon.
Ukraine’s military said two were killed and 13 injured in Russia’s shelling of Bakhmut, eastern Ukraine, during the purported ceasefire. The two dead were a 66-year-old man and 61-year-old woman.
Russian troops were “terrorising” civilians in the north-eastern region of Kharkiv, said its governor, Oleh Syniehubov. No casualties have been reported, but residential and commercial buildings continued to come under fire.
Russian forces shelled Ukrainian positions 14 times and stormed one settlement three times in the frontline eastern Luhansk province in the first three hours of the purported ceasefire, said its governor, Serhiy Haidai, Reuters reported. It heard explosions of what Ukrainian troops at the frontline described as incoming Russian rocket fire. Ukrainians fired back from tanks.
The Russian-installed governor of the occupied Crimean city of Sevastopol has said air defences shot down a drone in an apparent attack on the port where Russia’s Black Sea fleet is based. Mikhail Razvozhaev alleged that the incident took place early on Saturday.
The UK Ministry of Defence said fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces continued at a “routine level” into the Orthodox Christmas period. The ministry’s daily intelligence update stated that fighting was focused in heavily forested terrain to the west of the town of Kremina in eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk province, where “combat has devolved to dismounted infantry fighting, often at short range”.
The US has asked Italy to provide air defence systems to Ukraine as soon as possible. The Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported that the request was made in a conversation between the US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and Francesco Talo, an adviser to the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has praised the US for including tank-killing armoured vehicles in its latest multibillion-dollar package of military aid, saying they are “exactly what is needed”. The latest US military assistance announced on Friday by the White House was the biggest to date for Kyiv, and for the first time included Bradley armoured vehicles.
Services have taken place in Ukraine to mark the first Orthodox Christmas since Russia’s invasion of the country last year. Metropolitan Epiphanius led a Christmas service at the Holy Dormition Cathedral at the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra in the Ukrainian capital.
Ukraine has updated the number of Russian troops it believes it has killed to 110,740. The general staff of the armed forces said in an update on Saturday that a further 490 troops were killed on Friday.
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