Here’s what happened on Sunday, December 14th.
finding
Two people were killed in a Ukrainian drone attack on the Russian city of Saratov, regional governor Roman Busargin said in a statement on Telegram. The attack also injured an unspecified number of people. The Russian Ministry of Defense announced that it had attacked Ukrainian industrial and energy facilities with hypersonic Kinzhal missiles in retaliation for Ukrainian attacks on Russian “civilian targets.” The southern Ukrainian port city of Odesa and surrounding areas suffered a massive power outage overnight after a major Russian attack on the power grid left more than a million homes without power. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russia’s overnight attack on Ukraine included more than 450 drones and more than 30 missiles. Prime Minister Yulia Sviridenko said the attack was one of the war’s biggest attacks on Odesa, where electricity and water supplies were cut off. She said non-potable water supplies were being transported to areas of the city. Ukraine’s electricity grid operator said a “significant number” of households were without power in the southern regions of Odesa and Mykolaiv, and Ukrainian-controlled areas of the front-line Kherson region were completely without power. Ukraine’s navy has accused Russia of using drones to deliberately attack the Turkish civilian ship “Viva” transporting sunflower oil to Egypt, a day after Russia attacked two Ukrainian ports. The 11 Turks on board were not injured and the ship continued its voyage to Egypt. Earlier, there were reports that three Turkish ships were damaged in separate attacks. Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant temporarily lost all off-site power during the night, for the 12th time during the conflict, due to military activity that affected the power grid, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi said. Both transmission lines have now been reconnected, the IAEA said.
US-led negotiations
President Zelensky said he would meet with representatives of the United States and Europe in Berlin to discuss “the fundamentals of peace.” He added that Ukraine needed a “dignified” peace and guarantees that Russia, which launched a full-scale invasion of the country in 2022, would not attack again. U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner are scheduled to meet with Zelensky and European leaders in Berlin on Sunday and Monday, according to a U.S. official briefed on the matter. The Wall Street Journal reports that French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Starmer and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz are also scheduled to attend the Berlin conference. Europeans and Ukrainians are calling on the United States to provide “security” ahead of territorial negotiations in Russia-occupied eastern Ukraine, the French president’s office said. A Downing Street spokesperson said in a statement that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen discussed work on the U.S.-led peace plan for Ukraine and efforts to use frozen Russian state assets to finance Kiev. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, who just met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Turkmenistan, said he would like to discuss the Ukraine-Russia peace plan with President Trump, adding that “peace is not far away.”
politics and diplomacy
Ukraine has accepted 114 prisoners released by Belarus, including nationals accused of working for Ukrainian intelligence and Belarusian political prisoners, according to the Prisoners of War Coordination Center in Kyiv. The center posted a photo that appeared to show the released prisoners boarding a bus, smiling and hugging each other. Presidential aide Dmytro Litvin told reporters that Zelensky spoke with Belarusian prisoner Maria Kaleznikova after his release. Litvin told reporters that Chief of Military Intelligence Kirillo Budanov was present when Belarus received the released prisoners. North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency reported that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un attended a welcoming ceremony for the army’s engineering corps, which returned from a mission in Russia. At the ceremony, Kim praised the “heroic” actions of the soldiers during their 120-day overseas deployment. Russia has sentenced the International Criminal Court (ICC)’s top judge and chief prosecutor Karim Khan to prison terms in retaliation for the court’s 2023 decision to issue an arrest warrant for President Putin on war crimes charges during the war in Ukraine.
