Missile strike targets residential building in Kryvyi Rih; Christmas celebrations across Ukraine shrouded in grief. What we know on day 1,036

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A ballistic missile struck an apartment building in the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih on Tuesday, killing one person and injuring 15, four of them seriously, officials said. Ukrainian officials denounced the Christmas Eve attack on the city, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s home town.
“While other countries of the world are celebrating Christmas, Ukrainians are continuing to suffer from endless Russian attacks,” Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, wrote on Telegram.

Nearly three years into the Russian invasion, Christmas celebrations across Ukraine are shrouded in grief. “Not all of us are home, unfortunately. Sadly, not everyone has a home. And tragically, not everyone is still with us,” Zelenskyy said in an address. This will be the first Christmas that Lyubov spends without her son Taras Onyskiv, who died aged 32 in May while fighting off Russian troops on the eastern front. She brought a Christmas tree to her son’s grave in the Lychakiv cemetery in south-eastern Lviv, covered in a dusting of fresh snow. “We’ll come and spend Christmas here,” she said, after wrapping fairy lights over the tombstone. Mariya Lun lost her son Yuri in 2022. “We will bring Christmas porridge here on Christmas Eve,” Lun said. “We will pray that it will be easy for him in heaven without us.” Zelenskyy signed a law in July 2023 to move the official Christmas Day holiday to 25 December, departing from the Russian Orthodox Church tradition of celebrating on 7 January.

The presence of North Korean soldiers alongside Russian troops in the Russian region of Kursk has not yet had a major impact on the course of the fighting, a Ukrainian military intelligence official has said. “The involvement of the North Koreans in the fighting has not had a significant impact on the situation. It is not such a significant number of personnel,” Yevgen Yerin, spokesperson for the Ukrainian military intelligence service (GUR), told AFP. “But they are also learning. And we cannot underestimate the enemy. And we can see that they are already taking some things into account in their activities,” he added.

A Russian court has sentenced a man to 22 years in prison for two acts of sabotage on railway lines in Crimea last year. The court said Pavel Levchenko was recruited and trained by Ukraine’s SBU security service and sent to the annexed Crimea to carry out “acts of terrorism”. The court said Levchenko had carried out two explosions on railway lines while cargo trains were passing and had planned more acts of sabotage. Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in 2014.

Ukraine said Russia attacked it with 60 drones, of which 36 were downed, 23 were jammed by electronic warfare and one was still in the air. The Ukrainian air force said drones had been shot down in eight regions across the country in a statement posted on the Telegram app on Tuesday.