Zelensky says incoming US president willing and capable of achieving peace and ending Putin’s aggression
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Volodymyr Zelensky said he had no doubt incoming US president Donald Trump was capable of achieving peace as he issued his New Year’s message.
“I have no doubt that the new American president is willing and capable of achieving peace and ending Putin’s aggression. He understands that the first is impossible without the second. Because this is not a street fight where you have to calm down both sides,” he said in his video greeting.
Mr Zelensky thanked the current US administration for providing a wide array of critical military equipment, including 39 multiple-launch rocket systems, 301 Howitzer artillery weapons and over 300 million units of ammunition, as he recalled conversations with outgoing president Joe Biden and “everyone who supports us in the United States”.
His remarks came as a Russian helicopter was shot down by an uncrewed Ukrainian naval drone, in what Kyiv’s spy agency said was the first such strike in history.
In a battle near Cape Tarkhankut, on Crimea’s western coast, a missile-armed Magura V5 maritime drone struck a Russian Mi-8 helicopter. Dramatic video footage appeared to show the moment the chopper was downed into the sea.
Key points
Russia launched a drone strike on the Ukrainian capital Kyiv early today, wounding at least three people and damaging buildings in two districts, city officials said.
Explosions boomed across the morning sky shortly after Ukraine’s air force warned of drones approaching the city.
Mayor Vitali Klitschko said air-defences were repelling an enemy attack, and that two floors of a residential building had been partially destroyed in the strike.
Debris had also damaged a non-residential premise in another neighbourhood, he said.
Russia has carried out regular air strikes on Ukrainian towns and cities far behind the front line of its nearly three-year-old invasion.
Volodymyr Zelensky has said he has no doubt incoming US president Donald Trump is capable of achieving peace.
“I thank all Americans for proving these words with deeds. I have no doubt that the new American president is willing and capable of achieving peace and ending Putin’s aggression. He understands that the first is impossible without the second. Because this is not a street fight where you have to calm down both sides,” he said in his New Year video greeting.
He added: “This is the full-scale aggression of a mad state against a civilized one. And I believe that we, together with the United States, are capable of exerting that force. Of compelling Russia into a just peace. That means not forgetting, and not erasing everything Russia has done. Bucha, Olenivka, Avdiivka, all our destroyed towns and villages.”
Mr Zelensky also thanked the US administration for providing a wide array of critical military equipment, including 39 multiple-launch rocket systems, 301 Howitzer artillery weapons, and over 300 million units of ammunition.
Mr Zelensky also recalled conversations with outgoing president Joe Biden, and “everyone who supports us in the United States”.
Andrei Kotov, director of the ‘Men Travel’ agency, faced charges of ‘organizing extremist activity and participating in it’
The Ukrainian military said its forces had hit a Russian oil depot in the western Smolensk region, setting fire to tanks storing oil products.
Ukraine‘s general staff said on the Telegram app that the depot was used for military purposes. It did not specify the weapon used for the strike but said it was carried out in cooperation with drone forces.
Smolensk region governor Vasily Anokhin said that the attack caused a fuel spill and fire.
According to his statement on Telegram, 10 Ukrainian drones were shot down by Russian air defences but the wreckage of one of them fell on the oil facility.
Ukraine has staged numerous attacks on Russian oil storage facilities and refineries.
It is 25 years since Vladimir Putin was handed power on 31 December 1999 when Boris Yeltsin resigned, and it is something he has kept an increasingly iron grip on ever since.
While the Russian leader has repeatedly clashed with the West, Putin’s near three-year invasion of Ukraine – and the staunch support allies like Britain and the US have given Kyiv – has only intensified his threats and bellicose rhetoric.
As we move into 2025, the West has to be prepared to keep drawing Putin’s ire. Donald Trump, the US president-elect, has suggested he wants a swift resolution to the war in Ukraine once he takes office in January, and both Kyiv and Moscow have opened the door to peace talks. The UK and nations across Europe are aware that if Putin is given an inch, he will try to take a mile – so continued support for Ukraine on the battlefield is crucial.
The latest example of the consequences of Putin’s war in Ukraine beyond its borders was the first of the major air crashes in the last week – a few days before the tragic scenes in South Korea. On Christmas Day, an Azerbaijan Airlines plane flying from Baku to Grozny in the Russian region of Chechnya diverted across the Caspian Sea and crash-landed near Aktau, Kazakhstan, killing 38 of the 67 people on board.
Editorial: If the last 25 years have taught us anything, it is exactly who the Russian president is – and what he is capable of
Russian forces in 2024 advanced in Ukraine at the fastest rate since 2022, the war’s first year, and control about a fifth of the country. But the gains have come at the cost of heavy, though undisclosed, losses in men and equipment.
In 2024, Russia was invaded for the first time since the Second World War as Ukraine grabbed a slice of its western Kursk region in a surprise counter-attack on 6 August.
Russia has yet to eject Ukrainian forces from Kursk despite bringing in more than 10,000 troops from its ally North Korea, according to Ukrainian, South Korean and US assessments. Russia has neither confirmed nor denied their presence.
“To sustain even the very slow advance in Ukraine, Russia has been forced to ignore the months-long occupation of part of its own territory by Ukrainian forces,” British security expert Ruth Deyermond said.
“Taking a ‘nothing to see here’ attitude to the loss of its own land is not what great powers do, particularly one so preoccupied with the idea of state sovereignty.”
Deyermond, in a long thread posted on X, suggested Putin’s efforts to portray Russia as a leading world power were also undermined by the toppling of its chief Middle East ally, former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and its increasing dependence on China.
Mr Putin, the longest-serving ruler of Russia since Josef Stalin, said on 19 December that under his leadership the country had moved back from “the edge of the abyss” and rebuffed threats to its sovereignty.
With hindsight, he said, he should not have waited until February 2022 before launching his “special military operation” in Ukraine, the term he still uses for the full-scale invasion of Russia’s neighbour.
Russia launched an aerial attack on Ukraine striking the capital and other regions with multiple missiles and drones.
Ukraine’s air force reported a ballistic missile threat at 3am (1am GMT), with at least two explosions heard in Kyiv minutes later. Another missile alert was issued at 8am followed by at least one explosion in the city. Missile debris fell in the Darnytskyi district of the capital with no reports of casualties or damage, the local administration said.
Authorities in the northeastern Sumy region reported strikes near the city of Shostka, where the mayor, Mykola Noha, said 12 residential buildings had been damaged as well as two educational facilities. He said some “social infrastructure objects” were destroyed, without providing detail.
The air force also reported missiles and drones targeting several other regions of Ukraine. In Moscow, the Russian defence ministry said that its forces successfully struck a Ukrainian air base and a gunpowder factory.
Around half of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has been destroyed during the war, and rolling electricity blackouts are common and widespread.
When Boris Yeltsin suddenly resigned as Russia’s first post-communist president on New Year’s Eve, 1999, his country seemed to be spiralling downhill into economic and political disintegration. Few gave his largely unknown successor as acting president much chance of reversing the economic implosion or remaining in office for long.
The then prime minister Vladimir Putin’s media operation had already begun to portray the ex-KGB operative in stark contrast to the moribund Yeltsin as an action man. That same year the second Chechen war on the country’s southern border raged. Twenty-five years later, Vladimir Putin is still in the Kremlin but Russia is again in the grip of war on its post-Soviet periphery after last week’s downing of an airliner over Chechen airspace.
Add to the tension that Putin’s Russia has been engaged in a covert war against Ukraine since 2014, which he had turned into a full-scale invasion by early 2022 – a conflict that remains at an impasse today. As with his earlier war against Chechnya, Putin’s obduracy turned an opening military fiasco into a brutal war of attrition which Russia’s resources could win at a huge price.
Mark Almond writes:
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