The US is expected to announce $500m in military aid for Ukraine on Thursday at a final gathering of President Joe Biden’s weapons pledging conferences, meetings Kyiv says have been critical to its defence against Russia. The Ukraine Defense Contact Group (UDCG), comprised of about 50 allies who usually meet every few months at Ramstein airbase in Germany, was started in 2022 by US defense secretary Lloyd Austin to speed and synchronise the delivery of arms to Kyiv. The group’s future is unclear with president-elect Donald Trump set to take office on 20 January. Advisers to Trump have floated proposals to end the Ukraine war that would cede large parts of the country to Russia for the foreseeable future.
Ahead of the meeting, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy played down concerns over comments by Trump that he understood why Russia does not want Ukraine to join the Nato defence alliance. Zelenskyy, who has pushed for an invitation to join Nato before Trump’s return to the presidency, cautioned against making assumptions on the US position and said he would discuss the issue with Trump. “Don’t draw conclusions about the policy of the US right away,” Zelenskyy said. “We need to work and do everything possible to ensure that Ukraine receives decent security guarantees, worthy of our people, that could stop Putin. We will work on this.”
North Korea is benefiting from its troops fighting alongside Russia against Ukraine, gaining experience that makes Pyongyang “more capable of waging war against its neighbours” a senior US official has warned. More than 12,000 North Korean troops are in Russia and last month began fighting against Ukrainian forces in Russia’s Kursk region, Dorothy Camille Shea, the deputy US ambassador to the UN, told the UN security council. North Korea “is significantly benefiting from receiving Russian military equipment, technology and experience, rendering it more capable of waging war against its neighbours”, Shea told the 15-member council, which met over what Pyongyang said was a test of a new intermediate-range hypersonic ballistic missile on Monday.
A daytime Russian missile attack on the southern Ukraine city of Zaporizhzhia killed at least 13 civilians and wounded about 30 others on Wednesday, officials said. Footage posted on Zelenskyy’s Telegram channel shows civilians lying in a city street littered with debris. The post shows them being treated by emergency services and taken away on gurneys. Russian troops started launching the glide bombs at Zaporizhzhia in the middle of the afternoon, and at least two bombs struck residential buildings in the city, regional governor Ivan Fedorov said.
More than 12,300 civilians have been killed in the Ukraine war since Russia invaded nearly three years ago, a UN official said on Wednesday, noting a spike in casualties due to the use of drones, long-range missiles and glide bombs. Russia, which is making territorial gains in Ukraine’s east, has conducted regular attacks on faraway cities in recent months using such weapons. This contributed to a 30% rise in civilian deaths to 574 in Ukraine between September-November 2024 compared to the previous year, according to UN data.
Ukraine launched an overnight strike deep inside Russia that set fire to an oil depot that serves an airbase for Russian nuclear bomber planes, the Ukrainian military said on Wednesday. Russian regional governor Roman Busargin said the cities of Engels and Saratov, on opposite sides of the Volga river, had been subject to a “mass drone attack” and fire had broken out in Engels at an industrial site, which he did not name. He later posted on Telegram that the blaze had spread and two firefighters had died trying to put it out. He declared a state of emergency in Engels, which has a population of 200,000.
The UN voiced alarm Wednesday at a recent surge in alleged Russian executions of Ukrainian prisoners of war, saying it had verified 68 cases since the start of the war. “I call on the Russian authorities to halt the summary executions of Ukrainian prisoners of war,” Nada Al-Nashif, the deputy UN rights chief told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. “Summary executions constitute a war crime,” she said, urging Russia to “condemn such acts, and to prosecute those responsible”.
Zelenskyy and Moldovan President Maia Sandu on Wednesday discussed using Ukrainian coal to ease the energy crisis which has subjected Moldova’s separatist Transnistria region to blackouts and a heating shortage. Pro-Russian Transnistria, which broke away from Moldova in the final days of Soviet rule, has long relied on supplies of Russian gas. But flows to the region through Ukraine were halted on 1 January after Ukraine refused to renew an agreement allowing gas to transit through its territory.