Did you miss the latest events on the war in Ukraine? 20 minutes takes stock for you every evening at 7:30 p.m. Between the strong declarations, the advances on the front and the results of the battles, here are the main points of the day.
The fact of the day
Russia launched a vast series of strikes very early in the morning on several cities in Ukraine, including the capital Kiev, with “a record number of missiles”, which left, according to Ukrainian authorities, at least 18 dead and 132 wounded. “Russia used almost all types of weapons in its arsenal,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky immediately declared on the social network X. According to the Air Force, 158 missiles and drones were fired over Ukraine, of which 114 were destroyed.
“This is the most massive missile attack” excluding the first days of the war, air force spokesman Yuri Ignat said. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak estimated that these strikes demonstrated that Vladimir Putin “will stop at nothing”, while France condemned “with the greatest firmness” a “strategy of terror”. Denouncing “cowardly strikes”, the head of diplomacy of the European Union, Josep Borrell, for his part, promised that the EU “would stand alongside Ukraine, as long as necessary” .
At midday, Moscow limited itself to indicating in its daily briefing that “all targets had been reached”. She claimed to have targeted military infrastructure, ammunition depots and places where Ukrainian soldiers were deployed in more than 50 strikes, including a “major” one in Ukraine between December 23 and 29.
Sentence of the day
Everything indicates that a Russian missile penetrated Polish airspace. We spotted it using radar. He left this space towards Ukraine. »
These are the words of Polish Chief of Staff Wieslaw Kukula. Poland, a NATO member, said the missile flew over Polish airspace for three minutes, over around 40 kilometers. Maciej Klisz, operational commander of the Polish army, specified that he had “dispatched forces, planes to intercept and shoot him down if necessary, but the time (of overflight) and the way in which he maneuvered (…) l have made it impossible. This allowed the missile to leave Polish territory.”
The number of the day
9. This is, in years of prison, the sentence to which an ally of the imprisoned Russian opponent Alexeï Navalny was sentenced. The Sovetsky court in Tomsk (Siberia) “inflicted nine years in prison on Ksenia Fadeïeva”, 31 years old and former municipal deputy. “What happened during this trial has nothing to do with justice,” his lawyers said on Telegram. Accused of having “created an extremist organization”, Ksenia Fadeyeva led Alexei Navalny’s team in Tomsk.
Today’s trend
The wave of Russian strikes this Friday ends a difficult year for Ukraine, marked by the failure of its summer counter-offensive and a resumption of initiative by Moscow’s forces, who this week claimed the capture of the city of Marinka on the Eastern Front. They also come in a context of running out of Western aid to kyiv, both in Europe and in the United States, threatening the country with a shortage of ammunition and funds.
Russia would, however, suffer “enormous” losses in men and equipment, if we are to believe General Christian Freuding, who supervises support for kyiv within the Bundeswehr. “You know that, according to figures from Western intelligence services, 300,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or so seriously injured that they can no longer be mobilized in the war,” he told the German daily South German Zeitung. At the same time, however, Freuding recognized that Russia demonstrated a “capacity to resist” greater than what Western countries assessed at the start of the war: “perhaps we did not see, or we did not want to see , that they are able to continue to be supplied by allies. »
In this context, American Ambassador Bridget Brink estimated this Friday that Ukraine’s financial needs were “critical and urgent”, while, the day before, Volodymyr Zelensky had once again urged the United States to maintain their assistance “essential”. Remember that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban vetoed a new EU aid package, a problem that the Europeans hope to resolve at a summit in early February 2024.