Ukraine-Russia latest: Kyiv says North Korean troops using fake IDs have suffered 1,100 casualties in Kursk

Ukraine’s air defences downed 52 of the 103 Russian drones launched overnight, the Ukrainian military said on Sunday.

The military said on Telegram that it had lost track of 44 drones, and another had left the territory of Ukraine to Belarus.

The military gave no information on the fate of the remaining drones.

However, they said that in Kherson, Mykolaiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Zhytomyr and Kyiv regions, private businesses and apartment buildings have been damaged by the Russian attack.

“Tentatively, without casualties,” the military added.

The Russian Defence Ministry said on Sunday that Russian forces had captured two villages in Ukraine - Lozova in Kharkiv region and Sontsivka in Donetsk region, Russian news agencies reported.

These battlefield reports have not been independently confirmed.

North Korea has demonstrated that it could produce ballistic missiles and supply them to Russia for use against Ukraine in a matter of months, an expert said on Wednesday.

Jonah Leff told the U.N. Security Council that researchers on the ground examined remnants of four missiles from North Korea recovered in Ukraine in July and August, including one that had marks indicating it was produced in 2024.

“This is the first public evidence of missiles having been produced in North Korea and then used in Ukraine within a matter of months, not years,” he said.

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Moscow said it had downed 42 Ukrainian drones over five Russian regions overnight.

Twenty drones were shot down over the Oryol region, eight drones each were destroyed in the Rostov and Bryansk regions, five in the Kursk region and one over Krasnodar Krai, the ministry said in a post on the Telegram messaging app.

One attack triggered a fire at a fuel infrastructure facility in the village of Stalnoi Kon, said Andrei Klychkov, the governor of Oryol.

“Fortunately, thanks to the quick response, the consequences of the attack were avoided - the fire was promptly localised and is now fully extinguished. There were no casualties or significant damage,” he said.

It was the second week in a row where fuel infrastructure facilities in Oryol have been attacked.

The heads of the Rostov and Bryansk regions said there were no casualties or damage after the latest drone attacks.

For the world, 2024 was riven by — and in some ways defined by — conflict on two fronts.

The ripples after the previous year’s Hamas attacks in Israel left Gaza a shambles and tens of thousands dead, and an adjacent conflict between Israel and Hezbollah is playing out across the Lebanon landscape as the year ends.

A continent away, the Russia-Ukraine war, which began with Russia’s invasion in early 2022, rages on and evolves, claiming more casualties as it goes.

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Moscow sent 113 drones into Ukraine overnight into Saturday, Ukrainian officials said. According to Ukraine’s Air Force, 57 drones were shot down during the attacks.

A further 56 drones were “lost,” likely having been electronically jammed.

The governor of Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, Oleh Syniehubov, said eight people were wounded Friday night in drone attacks on the regional capital, also called Kharkiv.

In the city of Zaporizhzhia, four people were wounded when a nine-story residential building was damaged by falling drone debris on Friday night, regional Gov. Ivan Fedorov said.

Not so very long ago, Vladimir Putin, the would-be reincarnation of Joseph Stalin, had some cause for satisfaction. True, his ill-fated “special military operation” in Ukraine had spectacularly failed in its initial stated aim of subsuming the country into a Greater Russia, resistance supposedly crumbling in days, with Volodymyr Zelensky skulking off into exile.

However, the Kremlin’s “meat-grinder” strategy has succeeded in occupying roughly a third of what was left of Ukrainian territory after the 2014 invasion. Russian troops were advancing, albeit at a glacial pace and an obscene cost in human lives.

The attacks on civilians, homes and energy infrastructure were helping to demoralise and exhaust the Ukrainians, brave as they were. Some 40,000 fresh troops were promised by North Korea – Kim Jong Un’s elite squads, according to reports. Mr Kim and Russia’s other allies in the Middle East were assisting with the sanctions-busting; and the Iranians and Syrians (and, to a lesser degree, the Houthis, Hezbollah and Hamas) shared Russia’s agenda.

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Ukraine brought the war into the heart of Russia Saturday morning with drone attacks that local authorities said damaged residential buildings in the city of Kazan in the Tatarstan region, over 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) from the front line.

The press service of Tatarstan's governor, Rustam Minnikhanov, said that eight drones attacked the city. Six hit residential buildings, one hit an industrial facility and one was shot down over a river, the statement said.

A video posted on local Telegram news channel Astra shows a drone flying into the upper floors of a high-rise building.

The attacks, which Ukraine didn't acknowledge in keeping with its security policy, come after a Ukrainian attack Friday on a town in Russia's Kursk border region using US-supplied missiles killed six people, including a child.

Ukraine lacks the military capability to retake all the territories occupied by Russia since 2014, president Volodymyr Zelensky has acknowledged, as he urged the West to take stronger action to confront Moscow.

In an interview with the French newspaper Le Parisien, Mr Zelensky made it clear that Kyiv would not formally recognise Russian control over any Ukrainian territory.

“Legally, we cannot give up our territories. This is prohibited by the constitution,” the Ukrainian president said. “But let’s not use such big words. Russia actually controls part of our territory today.”

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The Government has criticised Moscow’s “desperate rhetoric” after a senior ally of Vladimir Putin threatened The Times newspaper over its coverage of the assassination of a Russian general.

Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president and current deputy security council chair, said journalists at The Times were “legitimate military targets” and should “be careful” as “anything goes in London”.

His comments followed a Times editorial in which the newspaper described the assassination of Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov as “a legitimate act of defence” by Ukraine, which has claimed responsibility for the killing.

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