Ukraine’s Zelensky sends Christmas warning: ‘In the end, darkness will lose’
- In a video message, Zelensky thanked Ukrainian soldiers who are spending Christmas in the trenches at the front line, telling them ‘evil will be defeated’
- Meanwhile, Russian and Ukrainian military officials both reported downing enemy aircraft on Sunday in different areas of the front of their war
“In the end, darkness will lose. Evil will be defeated,” Zelensky said in the video message published on Sunday.
He added that the whole country would pray together during the holidays “for our freedom. For our victory. For our Ukraine.”
Putin challenger calling for peace in Ukraine blocked from Russia election
Zelensky thanked Ukrainian soldiers who are spending Christmas in the trenches at the front, and also shared his thoughts with all the families who will once again have to celebrate this year without husbands, sons and fathers who are fighting.
“All our warriors of light, the guardian angels of Ukraine,” Zelensky said. “They prove that miracles exist, but we must create them ourselves.”
Only the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which has long been linked to Moscow, has stuck with the old date.
Ukraine war: US targets banks with new sanctions in fight against Russia
Meanwhile, Russian shelling in southern Ukraine’s Kherson region killed four people on Sunday, including an 87-year-old man and his 81-year-old wife who died after a strike on their block of flats.
The barrage injured nine other people, including a 15-year-old, sparked fires in homes and at a private medical facility, and set a local gas pipeline alight, the head of the regional military administration, Oleksandr Prokudin, said.
“There are no holidays for the enemy,” Andriy Yermak, the head of the Ukrainian president’s office, wrote on social media, commenting on the Kherson attack. “They do not exist for us as long as the enemy kills our people and remains on our land.”
Kherson was not the only region of Ukraine to come under attack on Sunday. Russian forces launched 15 drone strikes overnight, and 14 of the Iranian-made Shahed drones were destroyed over the Mykolaiv, Kirovohrad, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, and Khmelnytsky regions, the Ukrainian air force reported.
Also on Sunday, two people were wounded during the Russian shelling of 20 towns and villages across northern Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, Governor Oleh Syniehubov said.
In Russia, a man was injured in the Bryansk region after a village close to the Ukrainian border came under fire, the region’s governor, Alexander Bogomaz, said.
Ukraine war: US targets banks with new sanctions in fight against Russia
The commander of Ukraine’s air force, Mykola Oleshchuk, said Ukrainian anti-aircraft units had struck a Russian Su-34 fighter bomber near the Russian-occupied city of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov in southern Ukraine.
Oleshchuk, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said the aircraft had not returned to its base, but gave no further details.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said earlier that its air defence systems had shot down four Ukrainian military aircraft over the past 24 hours – just two days after Zelensky said Kyiv had downed three Russian aircraft.
Reuters was not immediately able to corroborate the battlefield reports from either side.
Additional reporting by Associated Press, Reuters
