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

Here is the situation on Thursday, January 2:

Fighting

Two people were killed, six others were hurt, and two districts in two districts were harmed by Russia’s early morning drone strike on the Ukrainian capital Kyiv.
• The State Emergency Service claims that the strike partially destroyed two floors of a residential building in central Kyiv.
• 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”.

• On Wednesday, the Ukrainian military reported that 63 out of the 111 drones launched by Russia were shot down, and 46 were actually caused by electronic jamming.
• One woman was rescued from fire in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, after several residential buildings caught fire overnight, according to local authorities.
• 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

Russian and Ukrainian authorities reported that Russian gas has been blocked from entering Europe through Ukraine.
• After Kyiv allowed a contract for gas transit to expire, Russian Gazprom claimed it had no legal or technical means to pass through Ukraine.
• One of Moscow’s biggest defeats, according to President Zelenskyy, was the decision to stop Russian gas from passing through Ukraine.

• Herman Halushchenko, the minister of energy in Ukraine, described the stop to the transit as a “historic event” and as a “taken decision in the name of national security.
• Radoslaw Sikorski, the country’s foreign minister, praised the end of Russian gas transit through Ukraine as “a new victory after NATO enlargement to Finland and Sweden.”

Putin rigged Eastern Europe with the threat of shutting down gas supplies by spending billions on Nordstream to defraud Ukraine and sabotage Ukraine. Ukraine halted his ability to export gas directly to the EU today.
Following Finland and Sweden’s expansion of NATO, another victory is in store.

• Following the termination of a transit agreement to transport gas through Ukraine, Russian Gazprom has suspended gas deliveries to Slovakia.
• Slovak gas importer SPP stated that it had prepared for a situation like this and would provide all of its customers with alternative transportation options, primarily through pipelines from Germany and Hungary, but that additional fees would apply.
• 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 breakaway Moldovan region of Transdniestria immediately experienced the gas flow severing, which was forced to cut off heating and hot water to all households. Around 450, 000 people, mostly from Russia, split from Moldova in the early 1990s as the Soviet Union fell, and there are still about 1,500 troops there.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered his government and the country’s biggest bank, Sberbank, to build cooperation with China in artificial intelligence. Three weeks after Putin announced that Russia would collaborate with BRICS partners and other nations to develop artificial intelligence, Putin’s instructions were made public on the Kremlin’s website.