Russian attacks on Monday killed two in Ukraine’s central-east Dnipropetrovsk region and injured at least 19, with more people probably trapped under the rubble, said officials.
Ukraine said on Monday its hard-pressed military was battling 50,000 troops in Russia’s Kursk region to its north, while also scrambling to reinforce two besieged fronts in the east and bracing to meet an infantry assault in the south.
The Kremlin dismissed on Monday reports that US president-elect Donald Trump had spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin in recent days as “pure fiction”.
Russian attacks kill two, injure 19 in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region
Russian attacks on Monday killed two in Ukraine’s central-east Dnipropetrovsk region and injured at least 19, with more people probably trapped under the rubble, said officials.
Shelling by artillery killed two people in Nikopol and injured five more, said regional governor Serhiy Lysak on the Telegram messenger platform.
A medical facility, a restaurant and shops were damaged, he added.
Separately, at least 14 people were wounded after Moscow’s troops launched a missile at a residential building in Kryvyi Rih in the morning, according to Lysak.
Rescuers were looking for a woman with three children trapped under the rubble, he added. A 10-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy were among the injured.
The attack destroyed apartments from the first to the fifth floors, he said.
“Every day, every night, Russia unleashes the same terror. More and more civilian objects are being targeted. Russia only wants to continue the war, and each of its strikes negates any claims of diplomacy from Russia,” said President Volodymyr Zelensky on X.
He released a fresh appeal to allies for weapons supplies and “stronger global support” to repel Russian aggression.
Ukraine battling 50,000 troops in Russia’s Kursk
Ukraine said on Monday its hard-pressed military was battling 50,000 troops in Russia’s Kursk region to its north, while also scrambling to reinforce two besieged fronts in the east and bracing to meet an infantry assault in the south.
The escalating fighting along a more than 1,000km frontline is stretching Ukraine’s already outnumbered troops at a critical moment after Donald Trump won the US election, raising the prospect of possible talks with Russia.
Russia occupies a fifth of Ukraine and President Vladimir Putin has said he wants Kyiv to drop ambitions to join the Nato military alliance and retreat from four Ukrainian regions that he partially holds, something Kyiv says is tantamount to capitulation.
Ukraine’s armed forces commander, General Oleksandr Syrskyi, said he travelled to the front in Russia’s Kursk region where a surprise Ukrainian incursion carved out a chunk of land in August that Zelensky said could be used as a bargaining chip.
“[Russian forces] are trying to dislodge our troops and advance deep into the territory we control,” he said on Telegram.
Some US military analysts have questioned the rationale of the Kursk operation, which extended an already long front line, creating more strain for Kyiv.
Ukraine says Russia has deployed 11,000 North Korean troops to the Kursk region and that they have already been involved in clashes, urging the West to respond robustly.
Moscow neither denies nor confirms their presence.
Syrskyi said the Kursk operation had drawn in crack Russian fighters and relieved pressure that would have been brought to bear on several important outposts in the east where Russia has been making gains at its fastest clip since 2022.
“These tens of thousands of enemies from the best Russian shock units would have stormed our positions in the Pokrovsk, Kurakhove or Toretsk directions, which would have significantly worsened the situation at the front,” he said.
The Ukrainian governor of the Donetsk region said a dam at the Kurakhove reservoir had been damaged, creating a threat to villagers living near the Vovcha River. He blamed Russian shelling.
Zelensky said that Ukraine would strengthen positions on the Pokrovsk and Kurakhove fronts where Moscow has directed its offensive pressure for months.
Russia has been closing in on Pokrovsk, a strategic road and rail hub that has a coal mine. The small industrial town of Kurakhove is home to a major coal-powered thermal power plant.
A Ukrainian military spokesperson told Reuters that Russia was also moving trained assault groups to forward positions in the southern Zaporizhzhia region and that they were preparing to attack.
The southern front has seen far less fighting since 2023 when Ukraine launched a major counteroffensive that failed to break through heavily defended and mined lands held by Russia.
“[The assaults] could begin in the near future — we’re not even talking about weeks, we’re expecting it to happen any day,” said Vladyslav Voloshyn, spokesperson for the southern military sector.
Although it was not clear if they would involve a single offensive push or separate assaults, intelligence assessed that Moscow’s troops planned to use armoured vehicles and a considerable number of drones, he said.
“They are preparing both armoured groups and light vehicles — buggies, motorcycles — to conduct these assault operations,” he added.
Russia had already carried out preliminary reconnaissance and stepped up air strikes in the south by around 30-40% in the last two to three weeks, using bombers and unguided air missiles, he said.
Russia has been claiming the capture of village after village as it advances in Ukraine’s east, and has vowed to expel Ukrainian forces from its Kursk region. Reuters was not able to independently verify reports from the front.
Kremlin denies that Trump and Putin spoke in recent days
The Kremlin dismissed on Monday reports that Trump had spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin in recent days as “pure fiction”.
A source told Reuters on Sunday that Trump, who has criticised the scale of US military and financial support for Kyiv and said he will end the war quickly, had spoken to Putin in recent days.
The source told Reuters they were familiar with the conversation, first reported by The Washington Post, which cited unidentified sources as saying Trump had told Putin that he should not escalate the Ukraine war.
In an unusual move, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Monday no such call had taken place between Putin and Trump.
“This is completely untrue. This is pure fiction, it’s just false information,” he told reporters. “There was no conversation. This is the most obvious example of the quality of the information that is being published now, sometimes even in fairly reputable publications.”
Asked about the purported Trump-Putin call, Steven Cheung, Trump’s communications director, said: “We do not comment on private calls between President Trump and other world leaders.”
Finland dismisses ‘Finlandisation’ model for Ukraine
Forcing neutrality onto Ukraine would not bring about a peaceful solution to the crisis with Russia, Finland’s foreign minister said on Monday, adding that Moscow could not be trusted to adhere to any agreement it signs.
Ruled by tsarist Russia for more than a century, Finland gained independence in 1917. It then desperately fended off a Soviet invasion in 1939 and for a time sided with Nazi Germany in a bid to win back lost territory.
As the war ended with an Allied victory, Finland found itself compelled to spend decades maintaining friendly and accommodating relations with its eastern neighbour and treading a sometimes precarious path of neutrality to preserve independence — a tactic known as “Finlandisation”.
With the prospect of Trump seeking to end the conflict as quickly as possible and concerns from some allies that the terms could be imposed in Kyiv, one scenario could be to force a neutral status on Ukraine.
Russia has repeatedly demanded Ukraine remain neutral for there to be peace, which would de facto kill its aspirations for Nato membership.
Speaking in an interview with Reuters, Finland’s foreign minister, Elina Valtonen, poured cold water on using the “Finlandisation” model, pointing out that firstly Helsinki had fended off Russia in World War 2 and that despite the ensuing peace had always continued to arm itself fearing a new conflict.
“I’m against it [Finlandisation], yes. Let’s face it, Ukraine was neutral before they were attacked by Russia,” Valtonen, whose country has a 1,300km border with Russia, said on the sidelines of the Paris Peace Forum.
“It’s definitely not something I would be imposing on Ukraine. Definitely not as a first alternative,” adding that it would not make the problems go away.
The Ukraine invasion led both Finland and Sweden to abandon decades of military non-alignment and seek safety in the Nato camp.
EU has supplied Ukraine with over 980,000 shells, says Borrell
The European Union (EU) had supplied Ukraine with more than 980,000 shells for the war with Russia and planned to pass the one million mark by the end of this year, said EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell on Monday.
The EU initially set out to supply one million 155mm artillery shells by March, but officials later said production capacity was insufficient to meet the target.
“I know that we made a commitment to reach this level by spring — and we failed. But we can do it by the end of the year,” Borrell told Ukraine’s European Pravda media outlet.
Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala has said that a separate initiative led by Prague will have delivered 500,000 shells to Ukraine by the end of the year.
Putin approves no-disclosure waiver for Novatek, Surgut
Putin signed a decree on Monday allowing Novatek and its liquefied natural gas (LNG) units, as well as oil firm Surgutneftegaz to limit public disclosure about their businesses.
Russia started withholding some data shortly after its troops entered Ukraine in February 2022.
Certain oil and gas statistics and federal budget details are hidden, while banks were ordered to limit disclosures as Moscow seeks to limit its exposure to Western sanctions.
Under Russian stock market regulations, listed companies are usually required to disclose their financial results, details of large deals and other significant information.
Putin included the Novatek-led Yamal LNG and Arctic LNG 2 projects, which are subject to certain restrictions from the European Union and the US, in the list.
Novatek shut down commercial operations at the first and only operational train of its Arctic LNG 2 in October with no plans to restart it during winter, a source familiar with the matter has told Reuters.
The ruling is an addendum to a decree issued in November 2023, outlining a list of companies, which were allowed to limit their public disclosures in the face of Western sanctions.
Russia’s largest oil producer Rosneft and its units were given the waiver in November 2023.
Museum tanks enhance Ukraine training, says EU commander
Old Soviet tanks have been borrowed from museums to help train Ukrainian troops on what a commander of the EU training mission for Kyiv says are booby-trap tactics used by Russian soldiers on the battlefield.
Instructors from 17 nations have trained some 18,000 Ukrainian troops in Germany to operate high-spec tanks or precision air defence systems and passed on their skills to snipers, engineers, paramedics and for drone warfare.
But with the Russian and Ukrainian armies blasting thousands of shells at each other every day in grinding combat that echoes the trench warfare of World War 1, Ukraine has also sought training in circumstances more representative of the battlefield reality as well as on some older equipment.
So the German military has dug trench systems according to Russian standards and borrowed museum-piece Soviet tanks to enhance the on-the-ground experience at some of its training sites.
“These [museum] systems are in use on the Russian side, and they sometimes plant booby traps in abandoned gear," Lieutenant General Andreas Marlow, head of the EU’s Special Training Command near Berlin, told Reuters.
“Providing such vehicles in the training makes it easier to demonstrate where to be cautious to make sure that you don’t trigger an explosion if you find them on the battlefield and open the door.”
The training command declined to say where the tanks were borrowed from, or how many were in use.
The command is part of a European Union military mission set up in 2022 to train Ukrainian troops to combat Russia’s invasion.
On Friday, the mission was extended by another two years as Ukrainian troops face Russian forces advancing at the fastest pace since the early days of the war.
Part of the training in Germany now also involves studying Russian trench systems, which Marlow said were typically built to a fixed scheme.
“It is about the shape of the trenches, where to expect shelters and weapons positions,” he said.
Instructors are not only looking into the past for inspiration.
Modern simulators have been brought in to train Ukrainian units in combat shooting as well as high-tech dummies that present combat medics with more complex cases. DM