Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,043 | Russia-Ukraine war News

Here are the key developments on the 1,043rd day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Here is the situation on Thursday, January 2:

Fighting

• Russia launched an early morning New Year’s Day drone strike on the Ukrainian capital Kyiv that killed two people, wounded at least six others and damaged buildings in two districts.
• Two floors of a residential building in central Kyiv were partially destroyed in the strike, according to the State Emergency Service.
• Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that as the New Year started, all Moscow could think about was hurting Ukraine: “Even on New Year’s Eve, Russia was only concerned about how to hurt Ukraine.”

• The Ukrainian military said it shot down 63 out of 111 drones launched by Russia overnight on Wednesday, while 46 had been downed by electronic jamming.
• According to local authorities, several residential buildings in Ukraine’s southern city of Zaporizhzhia caught fire overnight following attacks and one woman was rescued.
• Ukraine’s Commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskii visited Ukrainian forces in the Russian border region of Kursk and said that the Russian army had lost more than 34,000 soldiers, either dead or wounded, in their attempts to drive Ukrainian soldiers out of Russian territory.
• Over the previous five months, approximately 700 Russian prisoners of war have been captured, which Ukraine could exchange for its own people held in Russian captivity, Syrskii said.

Economy

• The transit of Russian gas through Ukraine to Europe has been suspended, Russian and Ukrainian authorities said.
• Russia’s Gazprom said it had no legal or technical means to pump gas through Ukraine after Kyiv allowed a contract for gas transit to expire.
• President Zelenskyy said the decision to halt the transit of Russian gas through Ukraine was “one of Moscow’s biggest defeats”.

• Ukrainian Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko called the halt to the transit a “historic event” and was a decision taken “in the interest of national security”.
• Poland also hailed the end of Russian gas transit via Ukraine with Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski saying the cutoff marked “a new victory after NATO enlargement to Finland and Sweden”.

• Russia’s Gazprom has suspended gas supplies to Slovakia following the end of a transit deal to carry gas through Ukraine.
• Slovak gas importer SPP said it had prepared for such a situation and would supply all its customers through alternative routes, mainly by pipelines from Germany and Hungary, but it would face additional costs in transit fees.
• The Slovak government castigated Ukraine’s decision, with the country’s pro-Russian Prime Minister Robert Fico threatening in turn to stop electricity supplies from Slovakia to Ukraine.
• The severing of the gas flow was felt immediately in the breakaway Moldovan region of Transdniestria, which was forced to cut heating and hot water supplies to households. The mainly Russian-speaking territory of about 450,000 people split from Moldova in the early 1990s as the Soviet Union collapsed and still has about 1,500 troops stationed there.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered his 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, three weeks after he announced that Russia would team up with BRICS partners and other countries to develop AI.