Category World News

Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,391

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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”.

Trump comments on deaths of US filmmaker Rob Reiner and wife cause outrage

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Rob Reiner, who was found dead alongside his wife, Michele Reiner, at their Los Angeles home in what police are investigating as a double homicide, was not only a celebrated filmmaker but also a longtime Democratic Party supporter and one of US President Donald Trump’s most outspoken critics.

Reiner, 78, and his wife, Michele, 70, were discovered dead at their home on Sunday. Their son, Nick Reiner, has since been arrested on homicide charges.

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During Trump’s first term, Reiner repeatedly described the president as “mentally unfit” and “unqualified” to serve in office.

Now, Trump has caused outrage by linking the couple’s death to their personal dislike of his presidency.

Trump’s comments

In a social media post on Monday, Trump referred to Reiner as “tortured and struggling” and said he and his wife had passed away, “reportedly due to the anger he caused” by opposing Trump as president.

“He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

The president, who frequently lashes out at his opponents and praises public figures who support him, provided no evidence that Reiner’s political views contributed in any way to the couple’s death.

Trump’s post drew fierce criticism online from both Democratic and Republican politicians.

Republican Mike Lawler of New York

Republican Congressman Mike Lawler said on X that Trump’s statement was “wrong”.

“Regardless of one’s political views, no one should be subjected to violence,” he said.

Republican Thomas Massie of Kentucky

US Representative Massie described Trump’s comments as “inappropriate and disrespectful discourse about a man who was just brutally murdered”.

Massie is a Trump critic on the Republican side of the House of Representatives.

Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia

Lawmaker Greene, who was once one of Trump’s fiercest allies in Congress, and is now one of his strongest critics, said, “This is a family tragedy, not about politics or political enemies”.

“Many families deal with a family member with drug addiction and mental health issues. It’s incredibly difficult and should be met with empathy especially when it ends in murder,” she wrote on X.

Republican Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma

“A father and mother were murdered at the hands of their troubled son,” Congresswoman Bice said on X.

“We should be lifting the family up in prayer, not making this about politics,” she added.

Republican Don Bacon of Nebraska

“I’d expect to hear something like this from a drunk guy at a bar, not the president of the United States,” Congressman Bacon, who retires from the House next year, told CNN.

David Axelrod, former chief strategist to President Barack Obama

Axelrod described Trump’s comments as “perverse”.

“The absence of empathy & grace for the Reiner family in their moment of profound loss and grief is sad and revealing. For @POTUS, his grievances trump their grief,” he said on X.

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut

Senator Murphy said Trump had “lost it”.

“Now saying Rob and Michele Reiner caused their own murder because they didn’t support him. So sick,” he wrote.

Former President Barack Obama

“Rob’s achievements in film and television gave us some of our most cherished stories on screen,” Obama said on X.

“But beneath all of the stories he produced was a deep belief in the goodness of people – and a lifelong commitment to putting that belief into action.”

Bill and Hillary Clinton

Former President Bill Clinton shared a statement on X from him and his wife, Hillary, who ran against Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

“Hillary and I are heartbroken by the tragic deaths of our friends Rob and Michele Reiner. They inspired and uplifted millions through their work in film and television,” the Clintons said in the statement.

“And they were good, generous people who made everyone who knew them better through their active citizenship in defense of inclusive democracy, setting an example for us all to follow. Hillary and I will always be grateful for their friendship, unfailing kindness, and support.”

Florida Governor Gavin Newsom

“Rob was the big-hearted genius behind so many of the classic stories we love, with projects as wide-ranging as The Princess Bride to A Few Good Men,” Newsom said on X.

“His boundless empathy made his stories timeless, teaching generations how to see goodness and righteousness in others – and encouraging us to dream bigger. That empathy extended well beyond his films,” he added.

James Woods, US actor and producer

“Rob and I remained good friends ever since we made GHOSTS OF MISSISSIPPI,” Woods said on X.

“The studio didn’t think I was old enough to do the part, but Rob fought for me. Political differences never stood in the way of our love and respect for each other. I am devastated by this terrible event.”

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass

“This is a devastating loss for our city and our country. Rob Reiner’s contributions reverberate throughout American culture and society, and he improved countless lives through his creative work and advocacy for social and economic justice,” Bass wrote on X.

Joe and Jill Biden

Former President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, also shared their condolences online.

“Jill and I send our deepest condolences to everyone whose lives were touched by Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner’s extraordinary contributions,” Joe Biden wrote on X.

“We take solace in knowing their work will live on for generations to come.”

Nancy Pelosi, former House speaker

“The news of a deadly assault on Rob and Michelle Reiner in their home is devastating. It’s hard to think of anyone more remarkable and excellent in every field and endeavor they pursued,” Pelosi said.

“Rob was creative, funny, and beloved. And in all of their endeavors, Michelle was his indispensable partner, intellectual resource, and a loving wife.”

How will US respond to the killing of three of its soldiers in Syria?

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Washington has blamed ISIL (ISIS) for the attack and promised retaliation.

Three US soldiers have been killed in an attack in Syria’s central city of Palmyra.

It is the first known deadly attack on US forces since former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was deposed last year. Washington has accused the ISIL (ISIS) group of carrying out the assault.

The government in Damascus has expanded its ties with Washington and joined a coalition to fight the ISIL group.

But how much of a security challenge is ISIL in Syria?

Will the US now reinforce its military presence? What risks could that pose?

Presenter: Dareen Abughaida

Guests:

Colin Clarke – executive director of The Soufan Center

Dareen Khalifa – senior adviser at the International Crisis Group

Trump signs executive order labeling fentanyl ‘weapon of mass destruction’

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Washington, DC – United States President Donald Trump has said he will sign an executive order labelling fentanyl, and its core precursors, as a “weapon of mass destruction” (WMD), in the latest instance of his administration using increasingly militarised language to justify its operations against drug cartels and smugglers.

The announcement on Monday comes after the Trump administration’s repeated references to drug smugglers as “narco-terrorists” and its designation of Latin American cartels as “foreign terrorist organisations”.

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The administration has repeatedly claimed that international drug smuggling groups are not criminal networks bent on profit, but organisations aimed at destabilising the US.

“There’s no doubt that America’s adversaries are trafficking fentanyl into the United States, in part because they want to kill Americans,” Trump said on Monday during a White House event.

“That’s why today, I’m taking one more step to protect Americans from the scourge of deadly fentanyl flooding into our country,” he added.

“With this historic executive order I will sign today, we’re formally classifying fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction.”

It was not immediately clear if the label would have any practical impact, or what bearing it would have on fentanyl legally bought for medical use.

The executive order called simply for a series of actions from the heads of executive agencies to “eliminate the threat of illicit fentanyl and its core precursor chemicals to the United States”.

Under current US law, which the president cannot unilaterally change, a weapon of mass destruction is defined as “any weapon that is designed or intended to cause death or serious bodily injury through the release, dissemination, or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals, or their precursors”.

The definition includes “any weapon involving a biological agent, toxin, or vector”, as well as “any weapon that is designed to release radiation or radioactivity at a level dangerous to human life”.

It also defines a WMD as any “destructive device”, including traditional bombs, missiles, grenades or items that can be converted to expel a projectile.

Increased threats

The Trump administration has used efforts to mitigate fentanyl smuggling as a pretext for increasing tariffs on Mexico and China.

The administration has also used its wider campaign against drugs to justify strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific – in what rights groups say could amount to extrajudicial killings – and to justify surging military assets off the coast of Venezuela.

Trump has repeatedly threatened to begin land attacks on Venezuelan territory to counter drug smuggling.

He repeated the threat on Monday. “We’re going to start hitting them on land, which is a lot easier to do, frankly,” he said.

Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro has maintained that the US pressure campaign is aimed at toppling his government.

Despite the heightened rhetoric against Venezuela, regional experts have noted that the country, and South America, are not known hubs for fentanyl production or exports.

“To be perfectly clear, there is no fentanyl coming from Venezuela or elsewhere in South America,” John Walsh, director for drug policy and the Andes at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) said during an expert briefing earlier this month.

Trump says deal to end Ukraine war ‘closer than ever’ after Berlin talks

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US President Donald Trump has said that an agreement to end Russia’s war on Ukraine is “closer than ever” after key leaders held talks in Berlin, but several officials said that significant differences remain over territorial issues.

Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday that he had “very long and very good talks” with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the leaders of France, Germany, the United Kingdom and NATO.

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“We’re having tremendous support from European leaders. They want to get it [the war] ended also,” he said.

“We had numerous conversations with President [Vladimir] Putin of Russia, and I think we’re closer now than we have been, ever, and we’ll see what we can do.”

Zelenskyy had earlier said that negotiations with US and European leaders were difficult but productive.

The high-level discussions, involving Zelenskyy, a US delegation led by envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and European leaders, took place in Berlin over two days amid mounting pressure from Washington for Kyiv to make concessions to Moscow to end one of Europe’s deadliest conflicts since World War II.

In a statement following the talks, European leaders said they and the US were committed to working together to provide “robust security guarantees” to Ukraine, including a European-led “multinational force Ukraine” supported by the US.

They said the force’s work would include “operating inside Ukraine” as well as assisting in rebuilding Ukraine’s forces, securing its skies and supporting safer seas. They said that Ukrainian forces should remain at a peacetime level of 800,000.

Two US officials, speaking to the Reuters news agency, described the proposed protections as “Article 5-like”, a reference to NATO’s Article 5 mutual defence pledge.

Ukraine had earlier signalled it may be willing to abandon its ambition to join the NATO military alliance in exchange for firm Western security guarantees.

Speaking to reporters in Berlin, Zelenskyy said that Kyiv needed a clear understanding of the security guarantees on offer before making any decisions on territorial control under a potential peace settlement. He added that any guarantees must include effective ceasefire monitoring.

Ukrainian officials have been cautious about what form such guarantees could take. Ukraine received security assurances backed by the US and Europe after gaining independence in 1991, but those did not prevent Russia’s invasions in 2014 and 2022.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Washington had offered “considerable” security guarantees during the Berlin talks.

“What the US has placed on the table here in Berlin, in terms of legal and material guarantees, is really considerable,” Merz said at a joint news conference with Zelenskyy.

“We now have the chance for a real peace process,” he said, adding that territorial arrangements remain a central issue. “Only Ukraine can decide about territorial concessions. No ifs or buts.”

Merz also said it was essential for the European Union to reach an agreement on using frozen Russian assets to support Ukraine to demonstrate to Moscow that continuing the war is futile. He warned that EU members must share the risks involved in appropriating those assets, or risk damaging the bloc’s reputation.

Meanwhile, the EU has adopted new sanctions targeting companies and individuals accused of helping Russia circumvent Western restrictions on oil exports that help finance the war.

In Moscow, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that Putin was “open to peace and serious decisions” but opposed to what he described as “temporary respites and subterfuges”.

Reporting from Berlin, Al Jazeera’s Dominic Kane said the outcome of the talks remains unclear.

“We know American emissaries were speaking to Ukrainians here in Berlin yesterday and today. Talks between those two groups have finished, according to a statement by Zelenskyy’s office,” Kane said.

“What we don’t yet know is how much of the US-led 28-point plan – parts of which were acceptable to Moscow but strongly opposed by Kyiv and EU officials – remains intact.”

Kane added that the German government has presented a separate 10-point proposal focused on military and intelligence cooperation rather than a peace settlement. European leaders are expected to continue discussions on the remaining areas of disagreement.

Fighting continues

Meanwhile, Ukraine said on Monday that Russia launched 153 drones overnight, with 17 striking their targets.

Russia’s Ministry of Defence said its forces destroyed 130 Ukrainian drones over Russian territory.

Kyiv said its underwater drones struck a Russian submarine docked at the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. Ukraine has stepped up naval attacks in recent weeks on what it has described as Russia-linked vessels in the Black Sea.

Russian forces have continued to target the Ukrainian port city of Odesa, with two Turkish cargo ships hit in recent days. Kyiv said the strikes were aimed at Russian targets.

Zelenskyy also accused Moscow of using its attacks as leverage in peace negotiations.

Israel to demolish 25 homes in occupied West Bank’s Nur Shams camp

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The Israeli military will demolish 25 residential buildings in the occupied West Bank’s Nur Shams refugee camp this week, according to local authorities.

Abdallah Kamil, the governor of the Tulkarem governorate where Nur Shams is located, told the AFP news agency on Monday that he was informed of the planned demolition by the Israeli Defence Ministry body COGAT.

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Faisal Salama, the head of the popular committee for the Tulkarem camp, which is near Nur Shams, said the demolition order would affect 100 family homes.

Israel launched Operation Iron Wall in the occupied West Bank in January. It says the campaign is aimed at combating armed groups in refugee camps in the northern West Bank.

Human rights organisations have warned that Israel is using many similar tactics it used in its genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza to seize and control territory across the occupied West Bank.

“This is part of a wider campaign that has persisted for about a year, targeting three refugee camps and demolishing or damaging a total of about 1,500 homes in the past year, and forcibly displacing 32,000 Palestinians,” said Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from the West Bank’s Ramallah.

Palestinians and human rights organisations say such demolitions are an attempt to “cage in” Palestinians and alter the geography in the West Bank, she added.

On Monday, a dozen displaced Nur Shams residents held a demonstration in front of armoured Israeli military vehicles blocking their way back to the camp. They protested against the demolition orders and demanded the right to return to their homes.

The head of the Palestinian National Council, Rouhi Fattouh, said that the Israeli decision is part of “ethnic cleansing and continuous forced displacement”, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.

‘Social death’

Omer Bartov, a professor of holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, told Al Jazeera that Israel was “dehumanising” the Palestinian population in the occupied West Bank.

“[It is creating] a growing situation of social death, which is a term that was used to describe what happened to Jewish populations in Germany in the 1930s. That is, that your population, the Jewish population of Israel, increasingly has no contact with the people on the other side, and it exists as if they don’t exist,” he said.

“It dehumanises the population because you treat it as a population that has to be controlled, and it dehumanises the people doing it because they have to think of that population as being lesser than human.”

Aisha Dama, a camp resident whose four-floor family home, housing about 30 people, is among those to be demolished, told the AFP she felt alone against the military.

“On the day it happened, no one checked on us or asked about us,” she said.

“All my brothers’ houses are to be destroyed, all of them, and my brothers are already on the streets,” said Siham Hamayed, another camp resident.

Nur Shams, along with other refugee camps in the West Bank, was established after the 1948 Nakba, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their homes in what is now Israel.