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The latest developments in Russia’s war on Ukraine. All times EST.
11:08 p.m.: After a Russian missile attack destroyed an ice arena in the town of Druzhkivka in Ukraine's Donetsk region on Monday, Ukraine's ice hockey federation released a statement on Telegram, Reuters reported.
"So it is that since the start of the war, the Russian occupiers have destroyed five ice stadiums," the federation said on its Telegram channel, naming them as the Druzhba venue in Donetsk, arenas in Mariupol and Melitopol, the Ice Palace in Sievierodonetsk and now the Altair arena in Druzhkivka.
Reuters was unable to independently verify the information.
10:25 p.m.:
9:38 p.m.: A Russian missile attack in eastern Ukraine destroyed an ice rink in the town of Druzhkivka in Donetsk region, Ukraine's Donbas ice hockey club said in a statement on its website, Reuters reported.
"As a result of rocket fire, the Altair ice arena was destroyed," the statement said, following earlier reports of a missile hitting the town and injuring two people. The statement added that the venue had hosted Ukrainian championships, international competitions, and cultural and mass events.
9:06 p.m.: Ukraine and the European Union will hold a summit in Kyiv on February 3 to discuss financial and military support, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's office said in a statement on Monday, Agence France-Presse reported.
Zelenskyy discussed details of the high-level meeting with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in his first phone call of the year, the statement said.
"The parties discussed expected results of the next Ukraine-EU summit to be held on February 3 in Kyiv and agreed to intensify preparatory work," the statement read.
8:06 p.m.:
7:13 p.m.: Europe's wholesale natural gas prices fell Monday to their lowest level since Russia invaded Ukraine, which had driven them to a record high last year.
A mild winter has enabled countries to tap less gas from stocks that were built up in anticipation of cuts in supplies from Russia, which was Europe's main supplier before the war.
The benchmark European contract — Dutch TTF gas future for the coming month — soared to a record $367 per megawatt-hour in March. It still reached as high as $364 in August.
But prices have been falling since then, hitting $77 on Monday — 50% down from a month ago and the lowest level since before the war on February 21.
6:18 p.m.:
5:30 p.m.: Despite unpredictable power outages the National Philharmonic of Ukraine, the musicians are playing almost every day. For some musicians it is uncomfortable to play in such low temperatures, but they keep on performing, no matter how dark and cold these days of war.
5:15 p.m.: Rocket debris and mines in Kharkiv region will serve as war crimes evidence, RFE/RL reports.
4:30 p.m.: Russia's war has caused damage to the environment worth $35 billion, Ukrainian Minister of Defense Oleksii Reznikov said Monday.
3:30 p.m.: In his video address Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Russia is planning prolonged drone attacks on Ukraine.
“We have information that Russia is planning a prolonged attack with "Shaheds," referring to the Iranian-made attack drones. Its bet may be on exhaustion. On exhaustion of our people, our air defense, our energy sector,” he said.
Zelenskyy said within the past two days, since the beginning of the year, the number of Iranian-made drones shot down over Ukraine is already more than eighty. “This number may increase in the near future. Because these weeks the nights can be quite restless,” he said.
But, he added, “we must ensure - and we will do everything for this - that this goal of [the] terrorists fails like all the others.”
2:45 p.m.: Anger erupted in Russia as scores of Russia troops were killed in one of Ukraine’s deadliest airstrikes, Reuters reports.
Russia's defense ministry said 63 soldiers had died in the attack which destroyed a temporary barracks in a former vocational college in Makiivka, twin city of the Russian-occupied regional capital of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.
"What happened in Makiivka is horrible," wrote Archangel Spetznaz Z, a Russian military blogger with more than 700,000 followers on Telegram.
"Who came up with the idea to place personnel in large numbers in one building, where even a fool understands that even if they hit with artillery, there will be many wounded or dead?" he wrote. Commanders "couldn't care less" about ammunition stored in disarray on the battlefield, he said.
The unleashed anger extended to Russian lawmakers.
Grigory Karasin, a member of the Russian Senate and former deputy foreign minister, demanded vengeance against Ukraine and its NATO supporters as well as "an exacting internal analysis."
Sergei Mironov, a legislator and former chairman of the Senate, Russia's upper house, demanded criminal liability for the officials who had "allowed the concentration of military personnel in an unprotected building" and "all the higher authorities who did not provide the proper level of security."
"Obviously neither intelligence nor counterintelligence nor air defense worked properly," he said in a post on Telegram.
Rarely does Russia acknowledge scores of deaths in one incident and releases figures for its casualties, and when it does, the figures are typically low-balled.
1:05 p.m.: The suspected mastermind behind the removal of a Banksy mural in a Ukrainian town could face up to 12 years in prison if found guilty, Ukraine's interior ministry said on Monday. The mural artwork, depicting a woman in a gas mask and a dressing gown holding a fire extinguisher, was taken off a wall in the town of Hostomel on December 2, according to officials.
The ministry announced on its website that the man it believes orchestrated the operation had been handed a "suspicion notice."
The artwork by the renowned British artist had been valued at over 9 million hryvnia ($243,900), the ministry statement said.
"The criminals tried to transport this graffiti with the help of wooden boards and polyethylene," it said.
"Thanks to the concern of citizens, the police and other security forces managed to arrest the criminals."
The mural was retrieved.
Banksy confirmed he had painted the mural and six others in Ukraine, Reuters reported.
12:15 p.m.: Investigators have discovered 25 torture chambers in the liberated areas of the northeastern Kharkiv region, head of the regional police Volodymyr Tymoshko reported on January 2.
Tymoshko described detention conditions of civilians as “inhumane,” reporting that Russian troops allegedly used electric shocks for torture and broke people’s fingers.
Tymoshko said 920 bodies of civilians allegedly killed by Russian troops, including 25 children, have been found since September 7, with 656 of the bodies identified.
In total, 1,699 civilians, including 74 children, were killed, and 2,596 were injured in the Kharkiv region since the start of Russia's invasion of its neighbor on Feb. 24, the official said, adding that 9,617 buildings were damaged or destroyed in the region, due to Russia’s attacks, The Kyiv Independent reports.
As of January 2, the Ukrainian military liberated 340 settlements in the Kharkiv region.
11:15 a.m. In an article posted by Ukrainian national broadcaster Suspilne, daunting pictures chronicle Russia’s invasion on Ukraine in 2022. The article is headlined “The year we became strong. 2022 in the photographs of the Society."
10:30 a.m.: EU ambassador to Ukraine Matti Maasikas told Ukrainian national news agency Ukrinform that the EU passed nine sanction packages designed to undermine Russia's ability to finance the war.
“We have radically reduced our energy dependence on Russia, because one of the main sanctions of the EU was the suspension of 90% of Russian oil supplies to Europe by the end of 2022, and thus the deprivation of Moscow's corresponding revenues,” he said.
The EU ambassador said that Russia can still sell oil to world markets but only at a significant discount. After Europe capped Russia oil at $60 a barrel, Russian oil sells for about $30 less than the world average. But “the most important point,” said the ambassador "such a gradual embargo on oil and reduction of gas imports frees Europe from energy dependence on Russia.”
Maasikas also said the EU has taken decisive steps to ensure that Ukraine has the necessary financial resources so that the country can continue to function fully to defend itself against Russia.
“A few days ago, the EU adopted an unprecedented package of macro-financial assistance for 2023 in the amount of 18 billion euros. This package complements the 7.2 billion euros allocated in 2022 and provides much-needed predictability to the state budget of Ukraine,” he said.
10:05 a.m.: President of the EU Commission expressed Europe’s support for Ukraine.
9:15 a.m.:
8:15 a.m.: Russia's Defense Ministry said on Monday, that 63 Russian servicemen had been killed in a Ukrainian missile strike on a building that housed Russian soldiers in the town of Makiivka, in the Russian-controlled part of Ukraine's Donetsk region.
According to The New York Times, the strike, on New Year’s Day, would make it one of the deadliest single strikes against Russian forces in Ukraine since the war began.
A spokesman for the Russian-installed proxy government in the Donetsk region called the strike in the city of Makiivka “a massive blow.”
Igor Strelkov, a Russian former intelligence officer also known as Igor Girkin, said in a post on Telegram, that the casualties included “many hundreds” of dead and wounded. But he added that it was difficult to know the true figure because many people “remained under the rubble.” He called the strike in the city of Makiivka “a massive blow.”
Video posted on social media showed firefighters at a severely damaged building and piles of steaming rubble, although it was not possible to independently verify the footage.
Ukraine struck the building using HIMARS, a guided rocket system supplied by the United States with a range of dozens of miles, according to the Ukrainian army’s strategic communications directorate in a post on Telegram.
7:45 a.m.: Ukraine said on Monday it had shot down all Russian drones in a massive wave of attacks, after Moscow launched air strikes against civilian targets, for the third night, intensifying its air war for the New Year holiday, Reuters reported.
Russian officials meanwhile were reeling from reports that high numbers of freshly mobilized Russian troops had been killed in a strike on a make shift barracks in occupied Ukraine, where soldiers were housed with an ammunition dump. A source close to the Russian-installed authorities told Reuters dozens had died.
After firing dozens of missiles on December 31, Russia launched dozens of Iranian-made Shahed drones on January 1 and January 2. But Kyiv said on Monday it had shot down all 39 drones in the latest wave, including 22 shot down over the capital.
Kyiv said the new tactic was a sign of Russia's desperation as Ukraine's ability to defend its air space had improved.
6:12 a.m.:
5:30 a.m.: Russia has deployed multiple exploding drones in another nighttime attack on Ukraine. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said Monday that 40 drones "headed for Kyiv" overnight. All of them were destroyed according to air defense forces, The Associated Press reported.
The attack signaled that the Kremlin wasn't planning any letup in its strategy of using bombardments to target civilian infrastructure and wear down Ukrainian resistance to its invasion. The barrage was the latest in a series of relentless year-end attacks including one that killed three civilians on New Year's Eve.
Moscow's invasion on February 24 has gone awry and it has put pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin as his ground forces struggle to hold ground and advance.
5:02 a.m.: Britain said on Monday its $90.5 million fund aimed at helping boost domestic production of nuclear fuel for power plants and cutting reliance on Russian uranium supplies was now open for applications, Reuters reported.
The fund, announced in July, will award grants to businesses involved in uranium conversion, a key stage in the process of creating nuclear fuel from the metal. It will remain open for applications from Monday until February 20.
Russia currently owns around 20% of global uranium conversion capacity.
4:25 a.m.: According to Reuters, Russia's Gazprom said it would ship 42.4 million cubic meters of gas to Europe via Ukraine on Monday, a similar volume to that reported in recent days.
4 a.m.: New Swiss President Alain Berset took office on Sunday. Agence France-Presse reported that one of the topics he covered in his New Year's speech in Zurich was Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
"And now there is a war in Europe which also has strong repercussions on our daily lives, whether in terms of energy or inflation,” Berset said. He later added that, “"The problems of others will sooner or later become our problems."
"But many of us, in Switzerland and around the world, want to face them. Enough of us remain optimistic and look to the future with confidence."
While militarily neutral, Switzerland has matched the economic sanctions imposed on Russia by the neighboring EU over Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.
3:30 a.m.:
3 a.m.: According to Reuters, Russia's buffeted IT sector risks losing more workers in the new year because of planned legislation on remote working, as authorities try to lure back some of the tens of thousands who have gone abroad without prompting them to cut ties completely.
Having relatively portable jobs, IT workers featured prominently among the many Russians who fled after Moscow sent its army into Ukraine on February 24 and the hundreds of thousands who followed when a military call-up began in September.
The government estimates that 100,000 IT specialists currently work for Russian companies overseas.
Now, legislation is being mooted for early this year that could ban remote working for some professions.
Hawkish lawmakers, fearful that more Russian IT professionals could end up working in NATO countries and inadvertently sharing sensitive security information, have proposed banning some IT specialists from leaving Russia.
But the Digital Ministry said in December that a total ban could make Russian IT firms less effective, and so less competitive: "In the end, whoever can attract the most talented staff, including those from abroad, will win."
2:29 a.m. :
2 a.m.: Detailed footage of brutal battles — from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or from a game? Agence France-Presse reported on the stir over Arma 3, a video game with battle sequences so life-like, they take a starting role in disinformation campaigns. Videos reportedly from the front line, and often marked “Breaking News,” are actually sequences taken from streams of the game. Experts explain how to tell fact from fiction when following online channels and accounts.
1:27 a.m.:
1 a.m.: As a result of overnight strikes on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, energy infrastructure facilities were damaged, causing power and heating outages, Reuters reported Mayor Vitali Klitschko as saying on Monday.
12:32 a.m.: A Ukrainian drone attack damaged a power supply facility in Russia's Bryansk region bordering Ukraine, Reuters reported the regional governor as saying on Monday. He added that there were no casualties.
"A Ukrainian drone attack was carried out this morning on the Klimovsky district," Governor Alexander Bogomaz said on Telegram.
"All emergency services are on site. As a result of the strike, the power supply facility was damaged, and there is no electricity."
Reuters was not able to independently verify the report.
The Klimovsky district of the Bryansk region borders Ukraine in its southern part.
12:01 a.m.: Russia has been targeting Ukraine's critical infrastructure in a series of drone attacks early on Monday on Kyiv and the region surrounding it, officials said.
Reuters reported that Russia kept pounding Kyiv for the second night in a row, after firing a barrage of missiles over the capital on New Year's Eve night and earlier in the day.
"It is loud in the region and in the capital: night drone attacks," Kyiv Governor Oleksiy Kuleba said on the Telegram messaging app.
"Russians launched several waves of (Iranian-made) Shahed drones. Targeting critical infrastructure facilities. Air defense is at work."
By 3 a.m. local time (0100 GMT), Ukraine's air defense systems destroyed 16 air objects above Kyiv, the city's military administration said. Air raid sirens were wailing by that time for more than three hours.
Some information in this report came from Reuters, The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse.
