New year drone strike kills 24 in Russian-occupied Ukraine, Moscow says | Ukraine
Russian officials said that although diplomats welcomed the fruitful peace talks, tensions between the two countries continued to rise, and 24 people were killed and at least 50 people were injured in a Ukrainian drone attack while celebrating the new year in a Russian-occupied village in Ukraine’s Kherson region.
Three drones attacked a cafe and hotel in the Black Sea resort town of Khorly, the region’s leader in Moscow, Vladimir Saldo, said on Telegram on Thursday. He said one of the drones was carrying a flammable mixture that caused the fire.
On Thursday evening, a Ukrainian military spokesman told the Interfax Ukrainian news agency that Kiev forces were targeting only Russian military or energy facilities.
The General Staff spokesman did not specifically address Russia’s accounts of the attack on a hotel, but said all attacks by the Ukrainian military were posted on the general staff’s social media page.
“The Ukrainian Defense Forces comply with the norms of international humanitarian law and attack only enemy military targets, fuel and energy facilities of the Russian Federation and other legitimate targets,” Interfax quoted a spokesman as saying.
Some Russian officials condemned the attack. Valentina Matviyenko, speaker of the upper house of parliament, said this strengthened Russia’s determination to quickly achieve its goals in the almost four-year occupation of Ukraine.
Matviyenko said the strike “once again demonstrated the correctness of our initial demands.”
The statement follows Moscow’s allegations on Tuesday that Ukraine carried out a long-range drone strike on one of Vladimir Putin’s official residences in northwestern Russia. Kyiv said the allegations were lies.
Russia’s defense ministry said on Thursday that it had accessed the navigation system of one of the drones that its experts claimed were used in the attack and that the resulting data confirmed that the target was Putin’s residence.
The department did not share evidence of its findings, but officials said the data would be passed to U.S. officials “through established channels.”
The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the CIA determined that: No attack attempts occurred. Donald Trump initially stated that he was “very angry” about the alleged attack, but later shared a link to a New York Post editorial on social media that described Russia’s claims as a “hoax.”
Russia’s defense ministry also released a video of a downed drone it said was involved in the attack.
In the clip, shot at night, a man wearing a camouflage suit, helmet and Kevlar vest stands next to a damaged drone lying in the snow. Man with covered face talking about drone. Neither the man nor the defense ministry gave any location or date, and neither the video nor the allegations could be independently verified.
Kiev has described the alleged attack on Putin’s residence as a ploy to derail peace talks that have gained momentum in recent weeks on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his New Year’s speech that the peace agreement was “90 percent ready” but that the remaining 10 percent, believed to include key points of disagreement such as territory, “will determine the fate of peace, the fate of Ukraine and Europe, how people will live.”
Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff said Wednesday that he, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner had a “productive meeting” with the national security advisers of Britain, France, Germany and Ukraine “to discuss advancing the next steps in the European peace process.”
“We focused on how we could move the discussions forward in a practical way. [the] “The peace process, including the strengthening of security guarantees and the development of effective de-conflict mechanisms that will help end the war and ensure that it does not restart,” wrote X.
Ukraine’s chief negotiator, Rustam Umerov, confirmed that European and Ukrainian officials plan to meet on Saturday, and that Zelenskyy is expected to hold talks with European leaders next week.
With additional reporting from The Associated Press
