Here is where things stand on Tuesday, December 16:
Fighting
- A Russian drone attack killed a 62-year-old Ukrainian man as he was riding a bicycle in the Velyka Pysarivka community of Ukraine’s Sumy region, Governor Oleh Hryhorov said in a post on the Telegram messaging app.
- Russian forces launched 850 attacks on Ukraine’s Zaporizhia region in a single day, injuring 14 people and damaging houses, cars and infrastructure, Governor Ivan Fedorov said on Telegram.
- Russian forces injured five people in attacks on Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, and six people in the Kherson region in the past day, local officials said, according to the Ukrainian news agency Ukrinform.
- In Dnipropetrovsk, those injured included a firefighter and factory worker, hurt after Russian forces launched a second attack on a factory in the Synelnykivskyi district, as rescuers tried to respond to a fire caused by an earlier Russian attack, the State Emergency Service of Ukraine reported on its website.
- Russian attacks caused power outages in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, as well as the Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions, the Ukrainian energy company NPC Ukrenergo said on Facebook.
- Ukraine claimed that underwater drones had, for the first time in the war, struck a Russian submarine docked in the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk.
- The head of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet press service, Aleksei Rulyov, denied that the underwater drone attack was successful. “Not a single ship or submarine of the Black Sea Fleet located at the base in Novorossiysk Bay was damaged,” he said. “The enemy’s attempt at sabotage through underwater drones failed to achieve its aims.”
Ceasefire talks
- US President Donald Trump said a deal to end Russia’s war in Ukraine was “closer than ever” after American, Ukrainian, European and NATO leaders met in Berlin for hours of talks on a potential settlement, hosted by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
- European leaders issued a joint statement after the talks, saying that any decisions on potential Ukrainian territorial concessions to Russia can only be made by the people of Ukraine, and once robust security guarantees are in place for Kyiv.
- They also said that US and European leaders had agreed to “work together to provide robust security guarantees”, including a European-led “multinational force” made up of nations willing to assist “in securing Ukraine’s skies, and in supporting safer seas, including through operating inside Ukraine”.
- Speaking at a news conference after the talks, Merz said that the US had offered “considerable” security guarantees, and that although there is now a “chance for a real peace process”, “territorial settlement remains a key question”.
Regional security
- Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov called “the EU’s aggressive actions the main threat in the world at the moment”, and claimed that the US is trying to put Europe “in its place”, in an interview with Iranian state television.
- Germany’s lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, suffered a major email outage. Officials told UK newspaper The Financial Times that they suspect it was a cyberattack, while the Ukraine ceasefire talks were taking place in Berlin.
- Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, the new head of the UK’s armed forces, has called for “national resilience” in the face of a “growing” risk from Russia. “It means more people being ready to fight for their country,” Knighton said of the threat from Moscow, while also referring to recent comments from his French counterpart, Fabien Mandon, who said France must be ready to “lose its children”.
