Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has confirmed he is on his way to the US, his first foreign trip since the war broke out 300 days ago. The US president, Joe Biden, released a statement saying that Zelenskiy will go to the White House on Wednesday before addressing a joint session of Congress “demonstrating the strong, bipartisan support for Ukraine”. A senior US administration official denied that Biden will pressure Zelenskiy to seek a diplomatic end to the war.
Zelenskiy’s visit to the US is “extremely significant” and will disprove Russian attempts to show that US-Ukrainian relations are “cooling”, Kyiv’s presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said. The Ukrainian president’s trip and meeting with his US counterpart will provide an opportunity to explain the real situation in Ukraine, what weapons Kyiv needs to fight Moscow, and why it needs them, Podolyak told Reuters.
The Kremlin has said nothing good will come of Zelenskiy’s trip to Washington and that Russia sees no chance of peace talks with Kyiv. In a call with reporters, the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that continued western arms supplies to Ukraine would lead to a “deepening” of the conflict – something that could backfire on Kyiv, he warned.
Air raid alerts were heard across all parts of Ukraine on Wednesday, according to local officials. There was no immediate word of a new wave of Russian attacks.
Vladimir Putin has vowed that Russia will fulfil all the goals of what Moscow calls its “military campaign” in Ukraine in an end-of-year meeting of his top defence officials. In his speech, where he laid his country’s military plans to defence chiefs in Moscow, Putin said he will ensure that Russia’s nuclear forces are combat-ready and that there were no financial limits on what the government would provide its military.
Russia’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, has called for his country’s military to be expanded from its current 1 million servicemen to 1.5 million amid the fighting in Ukraine. Speaking at an end-of-year conference with Russia’s military chiefs and Putin, also proposed raising the age range for mandatory Russian military service to cover Russian citizens aged 21-30.
The former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has undertaken a surprise trip to Beijing and held talks with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, during which he said they discussed the Ukraine conflict. Medvedev, now deputy chair of Russia’s security council, said he and Xi had discussed the two countries’ “no limits” strategic partnership, as well as Ukraine.
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, will visit Russia on Thursday for discussions on the creation of a security zone around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine, the Russian state-owned RIA Novosti news agency reported, citing Russia’s envoy to the international institutions in Vienna.
President Zelenskiy visited the frontline city of Bakhmut on Tuesday. He met military representatives and handed out awards to soldiers, his office has said.
A blast ripped through the Urengoi-Pomary-Uzhhorod gas exporting pipeline that leads from Russia through Ukraine. Reuters reported that three people died in the incident.
Ukraine was warned to prepare for new Russian attacks on its energy infrastructure. Prime minister Denys Shmyhal said Moscow wanted Ukraine to spend Christmas and new year in darkness.
Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, said the situation in four areas of eastern Ukraine – Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – that Moscow illegally annexed in September, was “extremely difficult”. Russia’s illegal annexation of the four territories, which together make up 15% of Ukraine, marked the largest forcible takeover of territory in Europe since the second world war and was condemned by Kyiv and its western allies as illegal. Russia has suffered acute setbacks in the areas, halting its ambitions.
The EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, on Tuesday condemned Iran’s support for Russia in its war in Ukraine and the ongoing repression of opposition in the country, but said the EU would continue to work with Iran on restoring the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. “Necessary meeting with Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian in Jordan amid deteriorating Iran-EU relations,” Borrell tweeted ahead of a regional conference being hosted by Jordan.
Ukraine is accelerating efforts to erase the vestiges of Soviet and Russian influence from its public spaces by pulling down monuments and renaming hundreds of streets to honour its own artists, poets, soldiers, independence leaders and others – including heroes of this year’s war. Since the war began, Ukraine’s leaders have shifted a campaign that once focused on dismantling its communist past into one of “de-Russification”.
China says Chinese-Russian naval drills beginning on Wednesday aim to “further deepen” cooperation between the two countries whose unofficial anti-western alliance has gained strength since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. The drills will be held off the coast of Zhejiang province south of Shanghai until next Tuesday, according to a brief notice posted Monday by China’s eastern theatre command under the ruling Communist party’s military wing, the People’s Liberation Army.