Ukraine war latest: ‘Russian and North Korean troops suffered significant losses’

Ukrainian forces shot down 61 of the 103 drones launched by Russia in an overnight attack on Saturday, its air force said.

The force added that 42 other drones were “lost” referencing Kyiv’s use of electronic warfare.

There have so far been no reports of major damage or casualties.

Poland is spending at least €2.5bn (£2.1bn) on its border defence system, including building a sky shield system akin to Israel’s “Iron Dome” to protect its eastern border from a growing threat from Russia.

In May, during a meeting with European leaders in Warsaw, Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk stated: “Creating an iron dome against missiles and drones is necessary … There is no reason for Europe not to have its missile defence shield,” confirming that work on the project had begun. He added that it requires little imagination to understand that Europe, like Israel, is also in the danger zone.

Russian forces have taken control of the village of Nadiya in eastern Ukraine, Russian news agencies cite Moscow’s defence ministry as saying on Saturday.

The battlefield report has not been independently verified.

President-elect Donald Trump could be decisive in the outcome of the 34-month-old war with Russia and help stop Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky said.

Mr Zelensky, facing advances by Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, said in an interview with Ukrainian television that Mr Trump had told him he would be one of the first to visit Washington after the presidential inauguration this month.

The Ukrainian president also said a priority was to stabilise the frontline early in the new year. Mr Putin, he said, feared negotiations as they would be tantamount to a defeat for Russia.

“He’s very strong and unpredictable, and I would really like to see President Trump’s unpredictability apply to Russia. I believe he really wants to end the war,” he said. “Trump can be decisive. For us, this is the most important thing,” he said in a televised interview.

“His qualities are indeed there,” Mr Zelensky said of Mr Trump. “He can be decisive in this war. He is capable of stopping Putin or, to put it more fairly, help us stop Putin. He is able to do this.”

Russian forces launched attacks near the city of Pokrovsk, a key strategic road and rail hub in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, the Ukrainian military said on Saturday.

Capture of Pokrovsk could create serious problems for the Ukrainian army on the eastern front, and may allow Russia to advance its frontline to the west.

“The Pokrovsk direction remains the hottest and there the Russians attacked 34 times (in the past 24 hours) and tried to break through our defences south of Pokrovsk,” a spokesman for Ukraine’s Khortytsia group of forces told national television.

Russian forces seek to cut off supply routes to Ukraine’s troops, the military added. They send small groups of soldiers to settlements south of Pokrovsk to block supplies.

“They (Russians) don’t go directly into the city because it means heavy urban fighting. So they first try to bypass the city and interrupt the logistics chains,” Trehubov said.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova, denounced the drone strike that killed a Russian reporter in eastern Ukraine as “deliberate murder”.

Ms Zakharova described it as “another brutal crime in a series of bloody atrocities” of president Volodymyr Zelensky’s government “which openly resorts to terrorist methods to eliminate its ideological opponents”.

Data previously provided by the Committee to Protect Journalists counted at least 15 journalists killed since Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

A Russian guided bomb attack yesterday wounded 10 people, including two children, in a village in Ukraine’s northeastern Sumy region, near the Russian border, local authorities said.

The region borders Russia’s Kursk region and has been regularly shelled by Russian forces for months.

Video posted by president Volodymyr Zelensky showed parts of a building in the village of Svesa reduced to rubble. Rescue teams ferried residents out of the building on stretchers.

“An entire block of the building, from the ground to the fifth floors was destroyed,” Mr Zelensky said in his nightly video address. “Neighbouring houses were also damaged.”

Mr Zelensky said guided bomb strikes hit two other villages in Sumy region and also neighbouring Kharkiv region.

Russian and North Korean forces suffered heavy losses in fighting in Russia’s southern Kursk region, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday.

Ukrainian and Western assessments say that some 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.

In his nightly video address, Mr Zelensky quoted a report from top Ukrainian commander Oleksandr Syrskyi as saying that the battles had taken place near the village of Makhnovka, not far from the Ukrainian border.

“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,” he said. “This is significant.”

He didn’t provide any specific details. A battalion can vary in size but is generally made up of several hundred troops.

A Ukrainian drone strike killed a reporter near the city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, Russian media outlet Izvestia said on Saturday.

“The Ukrainian army launched a drone strike on a civilian car carrying Izvestia’s freelance correspondent Alexander Martemyanov,” the daily reported on its Telegram channel.

“The car was located far from the line of contact.”

Izvestia 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.

Currently, Russian forces are advancing in the east, slowly but surely, and they are shrinking Ukraine’s partial hold of the border region of Kursk.

That the Russians haven’t been more successful is a testament, above all else, to the resilience of Ukraine’s troops on the ground, many of whom have been fighting continuously for years. Dysfunction in the Russian military, with Mr Putin as its de facto commander-in-chief, is another.

But US president Joe Biden has sent the final military package of his tenure to Ukraine, ending the support (for now) of Kyiv’s most heavily-armed ally. US president-elect Donald Trump will soon re-enter the White House on the promise of ending the fighting altogether, even if that potentially means rewarding Mr Putin for his illegal land grab.