Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,406

Here is where things stand on Wednesday, December 31:

Fighting

• Russian forces shelled the town of Kostiantynivka in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, killing one person, an official said. The deadly attack came a day after an attack in Druzhkivka killed another person and wounded four, according to the Ukrinform news agency.
• Russian forces also launched waves of attacks on the Black Sea ports of Pivdennyi and Chornomorsk in Ukraine’s Odesa region, hitting two Panama-flagged civilian vessels – Emmakris III and Captain Karam – as they approached to load wheat, the Ukrainian navy said.
• Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Oleksii Kuleba said that oil storage tanks were also hit in the port attacks.
• Authorities in Ukraine’s northern Chernihiv region introduced a mandatory evacuation order for the residents of 14 border villages in four districts. The order will affect some 300 people who still live in the Novhorod-Siverskyi, Semenivka, Snovsk, and Horodnya communities, which have been experiencing daily shelling, an official said.
• Ukrainian Deputy Minister of Energy Olha Yukhymchuk said that 75,000 households in Chernihiv remain without electricity following Russian attacks on energy infrastructure in the region. There were also settlements in the Kharkiv and Sumy regions that were fully or partially without electricity, she said.
• Yukhymchuk also said that repair work had been completed on transmission lines near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to ensure “stable and reliable power supply to the station in the event of damage or shutdown of the Dniprovska overhead line due to” Russian shelling.
• Russia’s Ministry of Defence said it had taken control of two more settlements in eastern Ukraine. It identified them as the village ⁠of Lukianivske in the Zaporizhia region and ​the ‌settlement of Bohuslavka in the ‌Kharkiv ‌region.
• Russian authorities said that a Ukrainian ‍drone attack on the Russian Black Sea port of Tuapse ‍damaged port infrastructure and a gas pipeline in a residential area there. The regional administration said no ⁠injuries were reported.
• Other Ukrainian drone attacks on Russia’s Belgorod region killed a woman and wounded four other people, local authorities said.

Alleged attack on Putin’s residence

• Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia will “toughen” its negotiating position in talks on a deal to end the war in Ukraine as a “diplomatic consequence” of an alleged attempted drone attack on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s residence in northwestern Russia’s Novgorod on Sunday.
• Peskov said the attack, which Ukraine denies, was aimed at collapsing the peace talks and accused Western media of playing along with Kyiv’s denial.
• Ukraine has dismissed the Russian claim as lies aimed at justifying additional attacks against Kyiv and prolonging the war.
• Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Russia had not provided any plausible evidence of its accusations. “And they won’t. Because there’s none. No such attack happened,” Sybiha said on X.
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy slammed countries, including India and the United Arab Emirates, that have condemned the alleged attack, which he said “didn’t even happen”. He called the moves “confusing and unpleasant”.
• China said “dialogue and negotiation” remain the only “viable way out of the Ukraine crisis”, when asked for a comment on the alleged attack on Putin’s residence.
• Lin Jian, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, also called on “relevant parties to follow the principles of no expansion of the battlefield, no escalation of fighting and no provocation by any party”, to work towards the de-escalation of the situation, and to “accumulate conditions for the political settlement of the crisis”.
• The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington, DC-based think tank, said that its analysts found that the “circumstances” of the alleged attack did not fit the “pattern of observed evidence” usually seen “when Ukrainian forces conduct strikes into Russia”.
• The US ‌ambassador to NATO, Matthew Whitaker, cast doubt on Russia’s accusation, saying he wants to see US intelligence on the incident. “It is unclear whether it actually happened,” Whitaker told Fox Business’s Varney & Co.
• The ‍German ‍government also said it shares Ukraine’s concern that Russian ⁠allegations of the attack could be used as a pretext for ‍further ⁠escalation of Moscow’s war.

Diplomacy

• Zelenskyy said ‍that Ukraine and the Coalition of the Willing group of nations ⁠backing Kyiv plan to ​hold their next meetings at ‍the start of January. Zelenskyy said that the countries’ national ‍security advisers would ⁠meet in Ukraine on January 3, and with the leaders in France on January 6.
• He also told reporters that Kyiv was discussing with US President Donald Trump the possible ⁠presence of ​US troops in Ukraine ‍as part of security guarantees.
• “Of course, we are discussing this with President Trump and with representatives of the [Western] coalition [supporting Kyiv]. We want this. We would like this. This would be a ‍strong position of the security ⁠guarantees,” the Ukrainian president said.
• Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told officials that there is reason to hope for peace in Ukraine quite soon. “Peace ⁠is on the horizon; there is no doubt that things ​have happened ‌that give grounds for hope that this war ‌can end, ‌and quite quickly, ⁠but it is still a hope, far ‌from 100 percent certain,” he said.
• Tusk said security guarantees offered to Kyiv ‌by the US were a reason to hope the conflict could end soon, but that Kyiv would need to compromise on territorial issues.
• The US removed sanctions on Alexandra Buriko, the former chief ⁠financial officer ​of Russia’s state-owned ‍Sberbank, according to the US Treasury Department.
• Buriko was among ​a ‌group of senior executives and board members who ‌resigned from Western-sanctioned ‌Sberbank shortly after ⁠Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. She sued the Treasury Department in a Washington federal court in December 2024, arguing she had severed ‌ties with Sberbank days after it was sanctioned and that her continued inclusion on ‌the sanctioned list was unlawful.

Weapons

• Romania’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that the country would spend 50 million euros ($58m) to support a European initiative to buy weapons made by US companies for Ukraine, known as the Priority Ukraine Requirements List (PURL).
• Belarus ‌released a video of what it said was ‍the deployment on ‍its territory of the Russian nuclear-capable hypersonic Oreshnik missile system, a development meant to bolster Moscow’s ability to strike targets across Europe in the event of a war.