Ukraine war latest: Major drone attack on Putin’s forces by Kyiv

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has said that air defence units had intercepted three separate attacks by Ukrainian drones headed for Russia’s capital.

Sobyanin, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said air defence units southeast of the capital in the Kolomna and Ramenskoye district had repelled one group of “enemy” drones, without specifying how many were involved.

“At the site where fragments fell, no damage or casualties have occurred,” Sobyanin wrote on the Telegram messaging app, without specifying how many drones were involved. “Specialist emergency crews are at the site.”

The mayor posted two more announcements in quick succession.

Sobyanin said two drones also headed for Moscow had been downed by air defences in Podolsk district, south of the capital. He then reported a single drone downed in Troitsky district, in the southwest of the capital.

Specialist emergency crews were dispatched to all the sites, Sobyanin said.

Russia reprimanded the head of the UN children’s agency Unicef for not providing a “weighty argument for her refusal” to brief the Security Council on children in Gaza – a meeting requested by Russia.

Russia’s UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said Unicef Executive Director Catherine Russell, an American, had briefed the 15-member council on children in Ukraine “at the drop of a hat” in December, during the U.S. presidency of the council.

“So it would appear that for Unicef children in Gaza are less important than children in Ukraine,” Nebenzia said.

“The refusal of Unicef head to brief the Security Council about the horrific tragedy linked to the death of tens of thousands of children in Gaza is a flagrant step, which deserves our most serious censure,” Nebenzia told the council.

Russell is at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland with a focus on addressing humanitarian crises and was unable to adjust her schedule to brief the Security Council, said a Unicef spokesperson.

“Ms. Russell had offered the Director of Emergencies to deliver her statement on her behalf,” the Unicef spokesperson said. “The Unicef Executive Director has briefed the Security Council several times on the situation of children in Gaza and appreciates the council’s focus on children impacted by war.”

The Security Council has met dozens of times to discuss the war in Gaza. Israel’s armed and security forces, Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants, and Russia’s armed forces are all on the UN global list of offenders for killing and maiming children.

Russian forces recently executed at least six unarmed Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) in Donetsk, a US-based think tank said citing Ukrainian sources.

“Ukrainian sources circulated footage on 23 January of Russian soldiers shooting unarmed Ukrainian POWs in an unspecified area of Ukraine,” the Institute for the Study of War said.

Ukrainian officials are investigating social media footage of Russian forces executing six captured and unarmed Ukrainian servicemembers in an unspecified area of Donetsk oblast, the country’s human rights commissioner Dmytro Lyubinets said.

He noted that the footage shows a seventh Ukrainian POW in this group but that it is unclear what happened to the seventh POW based on the footage.

“ISW has frequently reported that Russian forces are conducting frontline executions of Ukrainian POWs and continues to assess that Russian military commanders are either complicit in or enabling their subordinates to conduct these executions,” the think tank said.

South Korea’s military said it suspects North Korea is preparing to send additional troops to Russia after its soldiers fighting in the Russian-Ukraine war suffered heavy casualties.

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff also assessed in a report distributed to journalists that North Korea is continuing its preparations to test-fire an intercontinental ballistic missile intended to reach the US.

They said that North Korea is believed to be accelerating preparations to send more troops to Russia, without saying how it reached the assessment.

Russia launched a barrage of drones in an overnight attack on Ukraine, killing three civilians and damaging residential and commercial buildings, officials said.

The interior ministry said that drone debris had killed two men and a woman in the central Kyiv region, and that another person was injured. The attack damaged a multistory residential apartment building, eight private houses, commercial buildings, and several private cars, Kyiv regional officials said.

As the war approaches the three-year mark, Russia has stepped up its air attacks on Ukraine, sending dozens of drones almost every night.

Ukrainian officials have said that Russian forces launched more than 7,000 drones in 2024, at least twice as many as in 2023. Most were shot down or redirected by electronic warfare, but many still hit their targets.

The European Union cannot rely on the United States to defend it and must increase military spending and security preparedness to help Ukraine and deter Russia from targeting any more of its neighbors, top EU officials have warned.

Donald Trump has said Volodymyr Zelensky “has had enough” and “wants to settle” with Russian president Vladimir Putin but criticised him for fighting back against Russia in the first place.

Mr Zelensky, he said, is “no angel” and “shouldn’t have allowed this war to happen,” even though it was Russia that invaded Ukraine.

“First of all, he’s fighting a much bigger entity, okay, much bigger. When he was, you know, talking so brave… Zelensky was fighting a much bigger entity, much bigger, much more powerful. He shouldn’t have done that, because we could have made a deal, and it would have been a deal that would have been, it would have been a nothing deal,” Mr Trump claimed.

“I could have made that deal so easily. And Zelensky decided: ‘I want to fight,’” he said, suggesting he believes the Ukrainian president should have capitulated and conceded territory in the face of the impending Russian attack.

Ukraine is in the final stages of drafting recruitment reforms to attract 18- to 25-year-olds who are currently exempt from mobilization as it looks for ways to bolster its fighting force, the battlefield commander recently appointed to the President’s Office said.