Russia-Ukraine war updates: Kharkiv death toll rises to six

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Here’s a recap of the main developments:

• The Ukrainian army lost more than 105 military personnel in the southern Donetsk direction in the past 24 hours, as well as an Akatsiya self-propelled artillery unit and seven vehicles, according to Russia’s defence ministry.
• Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, the head of Ukraine’s parliamentary committee on freedom of speech, has said that Russia is holding 26 Ukrainian journalists “in captivity”.
• Ukraine’s Tavria air defence forces have said Russia attacked their area with 11 air raids, fired 836 artillery shells and engaged in fighting with the Ukrainian forces 39 times in the past 24 hours.
• NATO has said it does not see any imminent military threat from Russia towards any member of the alliance but is keeping up its deterrence with the largest exercise in decades set to kick off later his week.
• The US Central Intelligence Agency has released a Russian-language video to try to persuade Russian intelligence employees to switch sides and work as double agents for Washington.

Lithuania says it will seek to buy one battalion of German-made Leopard 2 tanks as the Baltic state bolsters its defences amid the Russia-Ukraine war, according to AFP news agency.

The NATO member and staunch Kyiv ally, which neighbours the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad as well as Moscow ally Belarus, has expressed concern over its security since Russia invaded Ukraine nearly two years ago.

“The state security council agreed that the most effective tank … is the German Leopard 2,” Lithuanian presidential security adviser Kestutis Budrys told reporters.

He said Lithuania’s Ministry of National Defence had been tasked with starting negotiations for a battalion of tanks.

Mstyslav Chernov’s new film, 20 Days in Mariupol, a harrowing chronicle of the besieged Ukrainian city and the international journalists who remained there after Russia’s invasion, has been nominated for best documentary at the Academy Awards.

The film, a co-production between the AP news agency and PBS’s Frontline, was shot during the first three weeks of the war in Ukraine, in early 2022.

Chernov, a Ukrainian journalist and filmmaker, arrived in Mariupol one hour before Russia began bombarding the port city. With him were photographer Evgeniy Maloletka and field producer Vasilisa Stepanenko.

Australia, the US and UK have imposed sanctions on a Russian man for his role in the cyber-breach at insurer Medibank, one of Australia’s biggest data thefts that impacted about 10 million customers.

Financial sanctions and a travel ban have been imposed on Aleksandr Ermakov after Australian authorities linked him to the breach at Medibank, Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said during a press briefing.

“These people are cowards and they’re scumbags. They hide behind technology, and today, the Australian government is saying that when we put our minds to it, we’ll unveil who you are, and we’ll make sure you are accountable,” O’Neil said.

Belgium will provide Ukraine with 611 million euros ($662m) from the proceeds received from frozen Russian assets, according to the Belga News Agency.

The report, citing the office of Belgian Defence Minister Ludivine Dedonder, said the assets were frozen in Belgium.

Russia’s Tass news agency earlier cited Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov as saying Kyiv would receive military assistance from Brussels in the amount of 611 million euros in 2024.

The body of a 21-year-old woman was found in the rubble of a destroyed house in Kharkiv, bringing the city’s death toll to six, according to the head of the Kharkiv regional state administration, Oleh Syniehubov.

An employee of the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations has been killed in Ukraine’s shelling of its Russian-held Kuibyshevsky in the district of Donetsk, according to the ministry’s press service.

It told Russia’s Tass news agency that 24-year-old Nikita Danilov was a combat engineer or sapper with the specialised rescue centre at the ministry.

“The deceased performed tasks in the most difficult and dangerous conditions. The noble mission to clear mines from liberated territories, unfortunately, turned into a tragedy,” said the head of the rescue centre, Alexander Kurenkov.

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico insists life in the Ukrainian capital is “absolutely normal” and there was no war just hours after Russian missiles fell on Kyiv.

Fico, who took power in October and reversed course on Slovakia’s foreign policy to halt military support for Ukraine, was speaking at a news briefing in eastern Slovakia. He is due to meet his Ukrainian counterpart, Denys Shmyhal, on Wednesday in the western Ukrainian city of Uzhhorod.

A reporter asked Fico if it would be appropriate for him to travel to Kyiv to better grasp Ukraine’s war with Russia, which is approaching its second year following an invasion by Moscow.

“There is a conflict that is localised,” Fico said.

“You seriously think there is war in Kyiv? You are joking, please, I hope you are not being serious. Go there and you will find out there is normal life in the city, absolutely normal life.”

US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin made his first public appearance, virtually and from home, since his secret hospitalisation, during a meeting on Ukraine’s military needs.

While waiting for Congress to pass a budget and potentially approve more money for Ukraine’s fight, the US will be looking to allies to keep bridging the gap.

“I urge this group to dig deep to provide Ukraine with more lifesaving ground-based air defence systems and interceptors,” Austin said in opening remarks broadcast from his home, where he is still recuperating after prostate cancer surgery.

NATO says it does not see any imminent military threat from Russia towards any member of the alliance but is keeping up its deterrence with the largest exercise in decades set to kick off later his week, according to Reuters news agency.

“We do all of this to ensure that we have the … forces in place to remove any room for miscalculation or misunderstanding in Moscow about our readiness to protect every inch of NATO territory, and as long as we do that, there will be no attack against the NATO territory,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters in Brussels.

Over the past few days, we’ve published several new pieces covering various aspects of the conflict.

Here are a few highlights:

In-depth: ‘I no longer have a country’: Antiwar Russians who fled unlikely to return

Photos: Russia unleashes mass air strikes on Ukraine

Video: Mental trauma in a warzone: Why Ukraine needs therapists

And there’s plenty more here.

Russia has told the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child that it had not forcibly moved any Ukrainian children to Russia, contradicting claims by Kyiv and NGOs.

“From February 2022, since then, the Russian Federation has not been involved in the deportation of citizens of Ukraine on the territory of the Russian Federation,” Alexey Vovchenko, Russia’s deputy minister of labour and social protection, told the UN committee.

The panel of 18 independent experts is examining Russia’s record as part of a regular review that all countries have to undergo.

“Just over three million residents of Ukraine – a number of them were children – these were accepted into the Russian Federation,” said Vovchenko, head of Moscow’s delegation at the hearing. “Most of the children came with their families or the guardians. They were placed in temporary shelters or with relatives.”

But he indicated that checks were under way concerning the situation of “over 5,000 children”.

Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, the head of Ukraine’s parliamentary committee on freedom of speech, has said that his office held a meeting with Reporters Without Borders to plan an international public campaign about the “captured journalists”.

“Currently, we know of 26 media persons captured by the Russians … This is a big challenge for our committee, we are looking for the support of our colleagues from abroad and doing everything possible to free our people,” he wrote on his Facebook page.

He named some of those journalists, including Viktoria Roshchyna – a journalist of the Ukrainian Pravda who disappeared on August 3, 2023, while reporting from the Russian-held Ukrainian territory.

Russian missile attacks have targeted the Ukrainian cities Kyiv and Kharkiv, killing several people, wounding dozens and damaging residential buildings, officials say.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said 20 people were injured, including a 13-year-old boy. Residential infrastructure was damaged in at least four districts.

In Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, four people were killed and at least 40 wounded. An entire section of a multistorey residential building was destroyed, trapping an unknown number of people.

At least one person has been killed and another wounded in a Russian missile attack on Dnipropetrovsk region’s Pavlohrad city, according to the State Emergency Service of Ukraine.

You can find images of the recent attacks here.

Ukraine’s Tavria air defence forces have said Russia attacked their area with 11 air raids, fired 836 artillery shells and engaged in fighting with the Ukrainian forces 39 times in the past 24 hours.

General Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, the commander of the Tavria operational-strategic group of troops, also claimed the Ukrainian troops killed more than 400 Russian soldiers.

Employees and students of kindergartens and schools in the city of Krasnodon and the Krasnodon region of the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) were evacuated due to the threat of a missile attack.

The education ministry of the Russian-backed separatist authorities told reporters that the measure was due to a missile threat alert, which was later lifted.

Kyiv was targeted by large drone and missile attacks around the end of December and the turn of the new year.

In the past few days, the Ukrainians have been reporting the use of long-range drones against as far north as Russia’s Baltic Sea coast.

And this does seem to be a reminder from Moscow that it can attack targets wherever it wants, anywhere across Ukraine.

Governor Oleh Synehubov has said on his Telegram channel that five people were confirmed killed and 51 injured in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.

Rescue workers dug through rubble to search for survivors there, Mayor Ihor Terekhov told local television. He said 30 apartment buildings had been damaged in the early-morning attacks.

A gas pipeline in Kharkiv was also damaged, state energy firm Naftogaz said. Thousands of residents were left without power after electricity infrastructure was damaged, the energy ministry reported.

A hacking attack has left about 100 people without hot water and heating in the Sikhv housing estate, according to Lvivteploenergo, the city’s utility company.

The company says the work is under way to restore the supply.