Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Saturday that Russian and North Korean forces had suffered heavy losses in battles in southern Russia. “In battles yesterday and today near just one village, Makhnovka, in Kursk region, the Russian army lost up to a battalion of North Korean infantry soldiers and Russian paratroops,” Zelenskyy said. “This is significant.” He provided no specific details. A battalion can vary in size but is generally made up of several hundred troops. Ukrainian and western assessments say that 11,000 North Korean troops are deployed in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces occupy swathes of territory after staging a mass cross-border incursion in August.
Zelenskyy also said “fierce battles” raged along the entire 1,000-km (620-mile) frontline, with the most difficult situation near the city of Pokrovsk. A Ukrainian military spokesperson earlier said Pokrovsk remained the “hottest” frontline sector, with Russian troops launching fresh attacks near the town in an effort to bypass it from the south and cut off supply routes to Ukraine’s troops. Ukraine estimates that about 11,000 of 60,000 people remain in the city that was once home to a mine that is the sole supplier of coking coal to Ukraine’s once-giant steel industry.
Russia on Saturday vowed to retaliate after it accused Ukraine of firing US-supplied Atacms missiles at the border region of Belgorod the previous day, saying all the missiles had been shot down. Atacms missiles have a maximum range of 300 kilometres (190 miles), according to publicly available data. US president-elect Donald Trump said in an interview published last month he was “very vehemently” opposed to Ukraine using the arms, and has also called for an immediate ceasefire as Ukraine braces for Trump to enter negotiations.
The Russian media outlet Izvestia said on Saturday that a Ukrainian drone strike had killed its reporter, freelance correspondent Alexander Martemyanov, near the city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. The paper said the car was travelling on a highway linking Donetsk, the Russian-held main town of Donetsk region, and the city of Horlivka to the north. Russia’s state owned Ria news agency said two of its correspondents travelling with Martemyanov were injured in the incident, along with two journalists working for a local publication in Donetsk.
A Russian strike on a village in Ukraine’s northeast Kharkiv region earlier on Saturday killed a 74-year-old man, regional governor Oleg Synegubov said. Moscow also struck a town in Ukraine’s northern Sumy region, wounding seven including a two-year-old girl, according to Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And in the Russian-occupied part of southern Zaporizhzhia region, a 10-year-old boy was killed and his parents injured when a drone hit their car, the region’s Moscow-installed head Yevgeny Balitsky said.
Russia’s defence ministry meanwhile said on Saturday it had captured the Ukrainian village of Nadiya, one of the few settlements in the eastern Luhansk region still under Kyiv’s control. Moscow advanced by almost 4,000 square kilometres (1,540 square miles) in Ukraine in 2024, according to an AFP analysis, as Kyiv’s army struggled with chronic manpower shortages and exhaustion.
Russia declared a regional state of emergency on Saturday in Crimea, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014, as workers cleared tons of contaminated sand and earth on either side of the Kerch Strait after an oil spill in the Black Sea last month. Mikhail Razvozhaev, the Russia-installed governor of the city of Sevastopol, said new traces of minor pollution required urgent elimination and declared a state of emergency in the city – giving authorities more power to take swift decisions such as ordering citizens to evacuate their homes. Rescue workers have now cleared more than 86,000 metric tons of contaminated sand and soil, the emergencies ministry said on Saturday. The oil leaked from two ageing tankers that were hit by a storm on 15 December. One sank and the other ran aground.
Russia has arrested four teenagers on suspicion of planning a “terror” attack on the city of Ekaterinburg, Russian state news agencies reported on Saturday. Russia has seen domestic security – already fragile – deteriorate in recent years, as the Kremlin channels resources into arresting those suspected of collaborating with Ukraine.
The separatist Moldovan region of Transnistria ordered a second day of rolling blackouts on Saturday, as a shutdown in Russian gas supplies starved the pro-Moscow self-proclaimed state of energy. The tiny breakaway republic bordering Ukraine has been unable to provide heating and hot water to its residents since Wednesday, when Moscow cut off gas supplies to Moldova over a financial dispute.
