Russian invasion of Ukraine: Day 697

Summary for Sunday, 21st January 2024 - DAY 697

• A fire broke out at the terminal of Russia’s largest liquefied natural gas producer Novatek on the Baltic Sea, the governor of the Leningrad region said early on Sunday.
  
  
• Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy fears that if Donald Trump returns to the White House next year he could make unilateral concessions to Russia that override Ukraine’s interests and branded the former US president’s claims he could stop the war in 24 hours as “very dangerous”.
  
  
• Zelenskiy has also spoken of putting together “new bilateral agreements” that will “reanimate” the system of international law. He added that new military packages will be delivered “in the coming weeks and months”.
  
  
• Slovak prime minister Robert Fico said on Saturday that Ukraine was under the absolute control of the US. The populist politician, who is against military aid to the war-torn country and opposes sanctions against Russia, also reiterated his opposition to Ukraine’s bid to join Nato. “Ukraine is not an independent and sovereign country,” Fico told public broadcaster RTVS. “Ukraine is under the total influence and control of the US.” Slovakia is a member of both Nato and the European Union. Despite Fico’s criticism, it was only Hungary that vetoed the €50bn of aid that other EU members had voted to give Kyiv last December.
  
  
• The UK’s Ministry of Defence has reported that Ukraine maintains a presence on the left bank of the Dnipro River and has continued to repel Russian attacks despite “logistical concerns”.
  
  
• Russian lawmakers have prepared a bill allowing for the confiscation of money and property from people who spread “deliberately false information” about the country’s armed forces, a senior member of parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin said on Saturday, Reuters has reported.
  
  
• Russia has lost 375,270 troops in Ukraine since the beginning of the war, the general staff of Ukraine’s armed forces claimed on Saturday. The number, which has not been independently verified, includes 750 casualties over the past day.
  
  
• Russian troops have reinstalled mines along the perimeter of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant which it occupies in the occupied Zaporizhzhia oblast, the International Atomic Energy Agency has said.
  
  
• The wife of a Russian soldier delivered an emotional appeal for his return from Ukraine on Saturday at the election headquarters of Putin – it was a defiant gesture by Maria Andreyeva in a country where open criticism of the war is banned.
  
  
• Andriy Yermak, the head of the office of the Ukrainian presidency, has referenced a quote from Winston Churchill in an interview with Le Figaro. Discussing the war in Ukraine, he said: “Give us the tools and we will finish the job.”
  
  
• Romanian protesters have ended their blockade at the Porubne-Siret crossing along the Romanian-Ukrainian border the Kyiv Independent reported, citing the border guard service. Romanian farmers and truck drivers had been protesting against high business costs.
  
  
• Russian forces launched seven Shahed-136/131 attack drones against Ukraine, four of which were shot down by Ukraine’s air defences, according to an update from the general staff.
  
  
• Russia has accused Ukraine of being behind a drone strike that sparked a huge inferno at an oil depot in western Russia on Friday, the latest in a series of escalating cross-border attacks. Russian officials and news reports said four oil reservoirs with a total capacity of 6,000 cubic metres (1.6m gallons) were set on fire at the oil refinery after the drone reached Klintsy, a city of 70,000 people located about 60km (40 miles) from the Ukrainian border.
  

Fire breaks out at Russia’s largest liquefied natural gas producer Novatek

At least 25 dead after shelling of a market in Russian-occupied Ukraine, officials say

At least 25 people were killed Sunday by shelling at a market on the outskirts of the city of Donetsk in Russian-occupied Ukraine, local officials reported.

A further 20 people were injured in the strike on the suburb of Tekstilshchik, including two children, said Denis Pushilin, head of the Russian-installed authorities in Donetsk. He said that the shells had been fired by the Ukrainian military.

Kyiv has not commented on the event and the claims could not be independently verified by The Associated Press.
Pushilin said that the area had been hit by 155 mm caliber and 152 mm caliber artillery, and that the shells had been fired from the direction of Kurakhove and Krasnohorivka to the west. He also confirmed that emergency services continued to work at the scene.

In a statement, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs described the strike, which it blamed on Ukraine, as a “terrorist attack.”
“These terrorist attacks by the Kyiv regime clearly demonstrate its lack of political will towards achieving peace and the settlement of this conflict by diplomatic means,” it said. Also Sunday, fire broke out at a chemical transport terminal at Russia’s Ust-Luga port following two explosions, regional officials said. Local media reported that the port had been attacked by Ukrainian drones, causing a gas tank to explode.

The blaze was at a site run by Russia’s second-largest natural gas producer, Novatek, 165 kilometers southwest of St. Petersburg.

In a press statement to Russian media outlet RBC, the company said that the fire was the result of an “external influence.” It also said that it had paused operations at the port.
Yuri Zapalatsky, the head of Russia’s Kingisepp district, where the port is based, said in a statement that there were no casualties, but that the area had been placed on high alert.

News outlet Fontanka reported that two drones had been detected flying towards St Petersburg Sunday morning, but that they were redirected towards the Kingisepp district. The Associated Press could not independently verify the reports.

The Russian Ministry of Defense did not report any drone activity in the Kingisepp area in its daily briefing. It said that four Ukrainian drones had been downed in Russia’s Smolensk region, and that two more had been shot down in the Oryol and Tula regions.

Russian officials previously confirmed that a Ukrainian drone had been downed on the outskirts of St. Petersburg on Thursday.

In the fighting on the front line, Russia’s Ministry of Defense announced Sunday that Moscow’s forces had taken control of the village of Krokhmalne in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region.

Ukrainian forces confirmed that the settlement had been occupied, but described its capture as a “temporary phenomenon.”

Volodymyr Fityo, spokesperson for Ukrainian Ground Forces Command, said that Kyiv’s troops had been pulled back to pre-prepared reserve positions.
He said that Krokhmalne had a population of roughly 45 people before the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. “That’s five houses, probably,” he was quoted as saying by Ukrainian news outlet Hromadske. “Our main goal is to save the lives of Ukraine’s defenders.”
Russian and Ukrainian forces have continued to fight from largely static positions along the roughly 1,500-kilometer (930-mile) front line throughout the winter.

Recent Russian attacks have tried to find gaps in Ukraine’s defenses by using large numbers of various types of missiles in an apparent effort to saturate air defense systems.
The massive barrages — more than 500 drones and missiles were fired between Dec. 29 and Jan. 2, according to officials in Kyiv — are also using up Ukraine’s weapons stockpiles.

Russians strike Krasnohorivka: one killed and one wounded

One person has been killed and another one wounded as a result of a Russian bombardment of Krasnohorivka in Donetsk Oblast on Sunday.

Russian private jet believed to have crashed in Afghanistan

Russian forces have taken control of Krokhmalne in Kharkiv region, says defence ministry

Further information has come in on claims by Russia that it had captured the small village of Krakhmalnoye in the Kharkiv region of eastern Ukraine.

Slovakia’s new culture minister Martina Šimkovičová has reversed a ban on cooperating with Belarus and Russia

Russia's capture of Krokhmalne is a 'temporary phenomenon', says Ukrainian military

One person injured after Russian forces struck Zaporizhzhia region 95 times, says official

Crimea rocked by reported explosions as key bridge closed

Several explosions were heard around the Crimean port of Sevastopol on Sunday following missile attacks by Ukraine, according to the Russian government, as officials temporarily closed a key bridge linking the peninsula to Russia.

Russian air defense systems shot down one target close to the city its Moscow-installed governor, Mikhail Razvozhaev, said in a post to Telegram on Sunday. There was no damage to the city's infrastructure, he said, attributing the attack to Ukraine.

Russia's Defense Ministry then said Kyiv had fired two guided missiles "over the Black Sea near the western coast of the Crimean Peninsula" at 2 p.m. Moscow time (6 a.m. ET) on Sunday. Russian air defenses intercepted the missiles, Moscow said. Shortly after, Russia said air defenses had shot down another Ukrainian missile over the same area half an hour after the initial strikes.

Razvozhaev told Sevastopol residents to evacuate to their nearest air raid shelter, before adding in a later update that the air raid alert had ended. Local Telegram channels reported several explosions around the port city, which is home to part of Russia's Black Sea naval fleet.

Crimean authorities said that traffic across the Crimean Bridge, also known as the Kerch Bridge, was "temporarily blocked," but offered no additional details. The Kerch Bridge is a strategically key link between Russia's Krasnodar region and the Crimean Peninsula, and was unveiled by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2018.

Shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Black Sea emerged as a key battleground. Ukraine has vowed to reclaim Crimea, which sits to the south of the mainland, but has been controlled by the Kremlin's forces since its annexation in 2014.

Ukraine frequently targets Russian assets across Crimea, including in Sevastopol, often using Western-supplied cruise missiles and attack drones. Kyiv succeeded in sinking the Black Sea flagship, the Moskva, in April 2022 and took out a Russian submarine in September 2023.

Kyiv's forces have also damaged a number of Moscow's landing ships, such as the Minsk, the Saratov and the Olenegorsky Gornyak.

In late December, Ukraine targeted Russia's Novocherkassk landing ship in the eastern Crimean port of Feodosia.

In the wake of the attack, Britain's defense minister, Grant Shapps, said the Kremlin has lost 20 percent of its Black Sea fleet in the previous four months, adding: "Russia's dominance in the Black Sea is now challenged."

Earlier this week, Atesh, a military movement of Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars opposing Russian rule in Crimea, said it had located a sunken Russian patrol ship not far from Sevastopol. The vessel was likely damaged by Ukrainian naval drones, the partisan group said.

"Satellite imagery of the Atesh-provided coordinates confirms that the corvette sank between December 28 and 31, 2023," the U.S. think tank, the Institute for the Study of War, said on Thursday.

North Korea is Russia's largest arms supplier at present, says Ukraine military chief

North Korea is Russia’s largest arms supplier at present, Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov told the Financial Times (FT) in an interview published on Sunday.

Closing Summary

• At least 25 people have been killed and 20 people were injured including two children, after shelling at a busy suburban shopping area in the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, according to local officials who said shells had been fired by the Ukrainian military. Ukraine has not commented on the event and the claims could not be independently verified. You can read Sam Jones’s report on it here.
  
  
• Russia called the shelling of a market in the suburb of Tekstilshchik, on the outskirts of Donetsk, on Sunday a “barbaric act of terrorism” and accused Ukraine of carrying out the attack with “the use of weapons supplied by the west”.
  
  
• A fire that broke out at a chemical transport terminal at Ust-Luga port, near St Petersburg in Russia, after two explosions on Sunday was due to an attack by Ukrainian drones, BBC News reported. An official source in Kyiv told the BBC that the “special operation” of the SBU security service masterminded the attack with drones that were “on target”.
  
  
• Russia’s capture of the village of Krokhmalne in the Kharkiv region is a “temporary phenomenon”, the Ukrainian ground forces command spokesperson, Volodymyr Fityo, said. Russia’s defence ministry said on Sunday, in its morning summary, that Russian forces had taken control of the village.
  
  
• North Korea is Russia’s largest arms supplier at present, Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov told the Financial Times in an interview published on Sunday. In the interview, Budanov also said Moscow was losing as many or more troops than it can recruit and that the Wagner group still exists, despite reports saying it had been dismantled.
  
  
• Russian president Vladimir Putin showed his intention to visit Pyongyang soon, according to Reuters. The news agency cited a report by North Korea’s state media KCNA on Sunday. Last week, Putin met North Korean foreign minister Choe Son-Hui on her visit to Russia and during the meeting thanked North Korean leader Kim Jong-un for his invitation to visit.
  
  
• Europe needs to “step up” and provide more funding for Ukraine, the UK’s defence secretary, Grant Shapps, has said. Speaking on the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg, Shapps said: “Europe needs to step up and do their part to make sure that Ukraine can continue to defend herself.”
  
  
• Russian forces struck Zaporizhzhia oblast 95 times across 16 localities in the last day, reports the Kyiv Independent, citing regional governor Yurii Malashko. He said a 71-year-old man was injured in Huliaipole due to artillery shelling, where there were also two reports of destroyed residential buildings.
  
  
• Russia has lost approximately 376,030 troops in Ukraine since the beginning of the war, the general staff of Ukraine’s armed forces reported on Sunday. The number, which has not been independently verified, includes 760 casualties over the past day.
  
  
• Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Alexander Grushko, said the scale of Nato’s Steadfast Defender 2024 exercises marked an “irrevocable return” of the alliance to cold war schemes.
  
  
• Slovakia’s new culture minister, Martina Šimkovičová, has reversed a ban on cooperating with Belarus and Russia, reports the Kyiv Independent, citing an article by the Slovakian publication Pravda on Saturday. Citing leaked documents, Pravda reported that the reversal would be effective from 22 January.
  
  
• Russia’s state RIA news agency said on Sunday it had calculated that the west stood to lose assets and investments worth at least $288bn (£226bn/€264bn) if it confiscated frozen Russian assets to help rebuild Ukraine and Moscow then retaliated.
  
  
• Ukrainian tennis player Marta Kostyuk believes that tennis has forgotten the war in Ukraine and she hopes that the success of Ukrainian women at the Australian Open will generate further attention for the issue. You can read Tumaini Carayol’s piece on Kostyuk here.
  
  
• Six people are missing after a private jet carrying out a medical evacuation from Thailand to Russia crashed in a remote area of Afghanistan after straying from its flight plan and disappearing from radar screens. It has not been confirmed as related to the Ukraine war. You can read Sam Jones’s report on it here.