Ukraine war briefing: New Year’s Day drone strike kills two in Kyiv

Russia launched a New Year’s Day drone strike on the Ukrainian capital Kyiv early on Wednesday, killing two people, wounding at least six others and damaging buildings in two districts, authorities said. Explosions boomed across the morning sky as Ukraine’s air force warned of incoming drones and mayor Vitali Klitschko said air defences were repelling an enemy attack. Two floors of a residential building in central Kyiv were partially destroyed in the strike, according to the State Emergency Service. Photos posted by the agency showed firefighters dousing a gutted corner of a building and rescuers helping elderly victims. “Even on New Year’s Eve, Russia was only concerned about how to hurt Ukraine,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on social media in response to the strike.

The breakaway Moldovan region of Transdniestria cut heating and hot water supplies to households on Wednesday after Russia stopped supplying gas to central and eastern Europe via Ukraine. The severing of the gas flow was felt immediately in the mainly Russian-speaking territory of about 450,000 people, which split from Moldova in the early 1990s as the Soviet Union collapsed. “There is no heating or hot water,” an employee of local energy company Tirasteploenergo told Reuters by phone. The gas supply was cut in the early hours of Wednesday after the expiry of a gas transit agreement between warring neighbours Russia and Ukraine. Transdniestria’s leader, Vadim Krasnoselsky, said the situation was “not an easy one, but on the whole, we were prepared”.

The flow of Russian gas through Ukraine stopped when Kyiv refused to extend a transit agreement amid the 34-month-old war. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday described the end of gas transit as “one of Moscow’s biggest defeats”. He said it was now Europe’s “joint task” to support Moldova “in this period of energy transformation”. Russia had been pumping about 2bn cubic metres of gas a year to Transdniestria, including a power plant that provided energy for the whole of Moldova, a country of 2.5 million people that wants to join the European Union.

Moldova says it is taking measures to cut its energy consumption by at least a third. It plans to meet 38% of its needs by domestic production, including 10% from renewable energy, and import the remaining 62% from neighbouring Romania. Ukraine has attacked countries that still buy Russian energy as helping fuel Moscow’s war machine, but the decision has caused mixed reactions in Europe. Slovakia, reliant on Russian gas, slammed the move. “Halting gas transit via Ukraine will have a drastic impact on us all in the EU but not on the Russian Federation,” said Slovak prime minister, Robert Fico, who has pushed Bratislava closer to Moscow since returning to power in 2023.

President Vladimir Putin has ordered Russia’s government and the country’s biggest bank, Sberbank, to build cooperation with China in artificial intelligence. Putin’s instructions were published on the Kremlin’s website on Wednesday, three weeks after he announced that Russia would team up with BRICS partners and other countries to develop AI. Western sanctions intended to restrict Moscow’s access to the technologies it needs to sustain its war against Ukraine have resulted in the world’s major producers of microchips halting exports to Russia, severely limiting its AI ambitions.