Vladimir Putin has vowed to back soldiers who defend Russia’s interests and ordered his government to give greater support to those who fight – after two people were killed in the latest drone and missile attacks on Ukraine.
Speaking on the eve of Orthodox Christmas, the Russian president said on Saturday while meeting families of soldiers killed in Ukraine: “Many of our men, our courageous, heroic guys, Russian warriors, even now, on this holiday, defend the interests of our country with arms in hand.”
Last year Mr Putin called for a ceasefire in Ukraine to coincide with the holiday, which many Orthodox Christians celebrate on 6-7 January, but this year he made no such remark.
Image: Vladimir Putin with the families of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine
State TV showed Mr Putin attending an intimate midnight service, known as the Divine Liturgy, with a small group of families at a chapel at his residence in Novo-Ogaryovo outside of Moscow.
Russian soldiers marked Orthodox Christmas on Sunday, with Russia’s Defence Ministry saying military priests led prayer services on the front line of the war this weekend.
Image: Russian priests conduct Orthodox Christmas services for soldiers in Ukraine. Pics: AP
Image: Pic: AP
Meanwhile, two people were killed and several others wounded in Russian attacks on the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, local officials said.
Ukraine said Russia launched 28 drones and cruise missiles in attacks mostly on the south and east overnight, adding that its air defence systems destroyed 21 of the drones.
Twelve people were injured in a drone attack in Dnipro city, Dnipropetrovsk authorities said on Telegram.
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1:15
Moments after Russian strike on Ukraine
Elsewhere more than 100 residents of the Russian border city of Belgorod evacuated to an area further from the Ukrainian border, local officials said. Ukrainian attacks on the city on 30 December killed 25 people there, the officials said, with rocket and drone attacks continuing throughout this week.
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Russia fired almost 300 missiles and used more than 200 drones in attacks in the last days of 2023 and the first days of 2024.
Image: Rescuers at the site of a residential building damaged during a Russian drone attack in Dnipro
Image: Firefighters at the aftermath of a Russian missile strike that hit an apartment building in Pokrovsk. Pic: AP
Russia can be defeated, Zelenskyy says
Moscow’s assault on Ukraine can be defeated, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, adding the situation on the battlefield remains relatively stable.
“Even Russia can be brought back within the framework of international law. Its aggression can be defeated,” the Ukrainian president told a conference in Sweden via video link on Sunday.
The war has shown Europe must develop joint weapons production to ensure the continent can “preserve itself” under any global situation that might arise, Mr Zelenskyy added.
“Two years of this war have proven that Europe needs its own sufficient arsenal for the defence of freedom, its own capabilities to ensure defence,” he said.
Image: Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaking via video link at a defence conference in Sweden
Mr Zelenskyy will continue to seek support from allies in 2024 and will welcome the support of Sweden’s Foreign Minister Tobias Bilstrom, who told the conference the primary task of Sweden’s foreign policy in the coming years will be to support Ukraine.
Japan’s Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa also pledged her country’s continued support for Ukraine when she visited Kyiv – and was forced to hold a news conference in a shelter due to an air raid alert.
A charity has warned 25% of young children and pregnant women in Gaza are now malnourished, with Sir Keir Starmer vowing to evacuate children who need “critical medical assistance” to the UK.
MSF, also known as Doctors Without Borders, said Israel’s “deliberate use of starvation as a weapon” has reached unprecedented levels – with patients and healthcare workers both fighting to survive.
It claimed that, at one of its clinics in Gaza City, rates of severe malnutrition in children under five have trebled over the past two weeks – and described the lack of food and water on the ground as “unconscionable”.
Image: Pic: Reuters
The charity also criticised the high number of fatalities seen at aid distribution sites, with one British surgeon accusing IDF soldiers of shooting civilians “almost like a game of target practice”.
MSF’s deputy medical coordinator in Gaza, Dr Mohammed Abu Mughaisib, said: “Those who go to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s food distributions know that they have the same chance of receiving a sack of flour as they do of leaving with a bullet in their head.”
The UN also estimates that Israeli forces have killed more than 1,000 people seeking food – the majority near the militarised distribution sites of the US-backed aid distribution scheme run by the GHF.
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1:20
‘Many more deaths unless Israelis allow food in’
In a statement on Friday, the IDF had said it “categorically rejects the claims of intentional harm to civilians”, and reports of incidents at aid distribution sites were “under examination”.
The GHF has also previously disputed that these deaths were connected with its organisation’s operations, with director Johnnie Moore telling Sky News: “We just want to feed Gazans. That’s the only thing that we want to do.”
Israel says it has let enough food into Gaza and has accused the UN of failing to distribute it, in what the foreign ministry has labelled as “a deliberate ploy” to defame the country.
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In a video message posted on X late last night, Sir Keir Starmer condemned the scenes in Gaza as “appalling” and “unrelenting” – and said “the images of starvation and desperation are utterly horrifying”.
The prime minister added: “The denial of aid to children and babies is completely unjustifiable, just as the continued captivity of hostages is completely unjustifiable.
“Hundreds of civilians have been killed while seeking aid – children, killed, whilst collecting water. It is a humanitarian catastrophe, and it must end.”
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2:10
Israeli military show aid waiting inside Gaza
Sir Keir confirmed that the British government is now “accelerating efforts” to evacuate children from Gaza who need critical medical assistance, so they can be brought to the UK for specialist treatment.
Israel has now said that foreign countries will be able to airdrop aid into Gaza. While the PM says the UK will now “do everything we can” to get supplies in via this route, he said this decision has come “far too late”.
Last year, the RAF dropped aid into Gaza, but humanitarian organisations warned it wasn’t enough and was potentially dangerous. In March 2024, five people were killed when an aid parachute failed and supplies fell on them.
The prime minister is instead demanding a ceasefire and “lasting peace” – and says he will only consider an independent state as part of a negotiated peace deal.
Israel has said foreign countries can drop aid into Gaza from today.
A senior IDF official told Sky News on Friday: “Starting today, Israel will allow foreign countries to parachute aid into Gaza.
“Starting this afternoon, the WCK organisation began reactivating its kitchens.”
Humanitarian aid organisation World Central Kitchen paused its operation in Gaza in November after a number of its workers were killed in an Israeli airstrike last year.
Aid workers in Gaza – who help provide food, medicine and shelter for the millions displaced there – have been affected by the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas.
In recent weeks hundreds of Palestinians have been killed while waiting for food and aid.
This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly.
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A British surgeon who recently returned from Gaza has told Sky News that there is “profound malnutrition” among the population – and claims IDF soldiers are shooting civilians at aid points “like a game of target practice”.
Dr Nick Maynard spent four weeks working inside Nasser Hospital, where a lack of food has left medics struggling to treat children and toddlers.
The conditions inside the hospital, in the south of the Strip, have been documented in a Sky News report.
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3:49
Malnourished girl: ‘The war changed me’
Dr Maynard told The World with Yalda Hakim: “I met several doctors who had cartons of formula feed in their luggage – and they were all confiscated by the Israeli border guards. Nothing else got confiscated, just the formula feed.
“There were four premature babies who died during the first two weeks when I was in Nasser Hospital – and there will be many, many more deaths until the Israelis allow proper food to get in there.”
Image: Palestinians wait to receive food from a charity kitchen in Gaza City. Pic: Reuters
In other developments:
• Israel and the US have recalled their teams from Gaza ceasefire talks
• US envoy Steve Witkoff has accused Hamas “of failing to act in good faith”
• France has announced that it will recognise the state of Palestine
• An influential group of MPs is calling on the UK to “immediately” do the same
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5:33
‘Starvation used as a weapon’
‘They were shells’
Dr Nick Maynard has been going to Gaza for the past 15 years – and this is his third visit to the territory since the war began.
The British surgeon added that virtually all of the kids in the paediatric unit of Nasser Hospital are being fed with sugar water.
“They’ve got a small amount of formula feed for very small babies, but not enough,” he warned.
Dr Maynard said the lack of aid has also had a huge impact on his colleagues.
“I saw people I’d known for years and I didn’t recognise some of them,” he added. “Two colleagues had lost 20kg and 30kg respectively. They were shells, they’re all hungry.
“They’re going to work every day, then going home to their tents where they have no food.”
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3:42
Ex-Gaza aid worker claims personnel shot at Palestinians
IDF ‘shooting Gazans at aid points’
Elsewhere in the interview, Dr Maynard claimed Israeli soldiers are shooting civilians at aid points “almost like a game of target practice”.
He has operated on boys as young as 11 who had been “shot at food distribution points” run by the US and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
“They had gone to get food for their starving families and they were shot,” he said.
“I operated on one 12-year-old boy who died on the operating table because his injuries were so severe.”
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2:54
Gaza deaths increase when aid sites open
Dr Maynard continued: “What was even more distressing was the pattern of injuries that we saw, the clustering of injuries to particular body parts on certain days.
“One day they’d be coming in predominately with gunshot wounds to the head or the neck, another day to the abdomen.
“Twelve days ago, four young teenage boys came in, all of whom had been shot in the testicles and deliberately so.
“The clustering was far too obvious to be accidental, and it seemed to us like this was almost like a game of target practice.
“I would never have believed this possible unless I’d witnessed this with my own eyes.”
Image: Palestinians brought to Nasser Hospital after being shot by Israeli forces, according to hospital officials and eyewitnesses. Pic: AP
Sky News has contacted the Israeli Defence Forces for comment.
An IDF spokesperson previously told Sky News it “strongly rejected” the accusations that its forces were instructed to deliberately shoot at civilians.
“To be clear, IDF directives prohibit deliberate attacks on civilians,” the spokesperson said, adding that the incidents are “being examined by the relevant IDF authorities”.
UNRWA, its relief agency for Gaza, has heavily criticised the scheme.
Commissioner general Philippe Lazzarini said: “The so-called ‘GHF’ distribution scheme is a sadistic death trap. Snipers open fire randomly on crowds as if they are given a licence to kill.”
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Just a fraction of the aid trucks needed are making it into the enclave, the UN has said, while multiple aid groups and the World Health Organisation have warned Gazans are facing “mass starvation”.
Mr Lazzarini quoted a colleague on Thursday and said malnourished Palestinians in the Gaza “are neither dead nor alive, they are walking corpses”.