Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,428

On Thursday, January 22, 2018, this is the situation:

Fighting

• According to the regional prosecutor’s office’s message on the Telegram messaging app, a 52-year-old woman was killed in a hospital after being hurt by Russian shelling in the Kherson region of Ukraine’s Dniprovskyi district.
• According to Vadym Filashkin, head of the Donetsk Regional Military Administration, Russian forces have dropped 768 guided missiles and high-explosive aerial bombs in areas of Ukraine’s Donetsk region still under Ukrainian control over the past ten days, destroying almost all remaining infrastructure.
• Following recent Russian attacks, Ukrainian energy company DTEK announced on Facebook that the country’s capital Kyiv’s power supply had been restored to “critical infrastructure,” but that the “city’s power system is still in deep emergency mode,” with daily outages now lasting for a month.
• About 44, 000 homes in the Dniprovskyi and Desnyanskyi districts, where about 44, 000 homes are still without power, were also affected by the attacks on Kyiv’s power generation facilities, according to DTEK in a separate post on Telegram.
• Without providing further details, the Ukrainian state’s power grid operator, Ukrenergo, reported a senior executive died while overseeing repairs at a power plant that had been damaged by a Russian strike.
• According to the regional emergency services task force, Ukrainian forces reportedly attacked a port in the village of Volna in the southern Krasnodar region of Russia, killing three people and injuring eight, according to the country’s TASS state news agency.
• Four oil storage tanks were “engulfed in flames,” according to Veniamin Kondratyev, the regional governor of Krasnodar, earlier on Telegram.
• An Uzbek man was found guilty of killing top Russian general Igor Kirillov and his assistant in a 2024 bombing attack and was given a life sentence by a military court in Moscow.

Regional security

• Ruben Brekelmans, the head of Dutch defense, claimed in a post on X that Dutch navy ships “escorted Russian vessels away from the North Sea for the second time in a short period.” We are aware that these Russian ships can be used to eavesdrop on and map important maritime infrastructure, according to the minister.
• A German-Ukrainian woman was detained on Wednesday after being accused of spying for Russia through contacts with former German Defense Ministry employees, gathering information about drone production for Ukraine, and attending political events.
• Due to the crisis in Greenland, NATO members are faced with difficult decisions, but Western allies must remember that Russia, which is increasing its military presence in the Arctic, is their common adversary, according to Norway’s defense minister Tore Sandvik, who spoke to foreign correspondents in Oslo on Wednesday.

Politics and diplomacy

• Donald Trump, the president of the United States, is meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine for the World Economic Forum, adding that he believes both the Ukrainian leader and Vladimir Putin want to end the nearly four-year conflict in Ukraine and that a resolution is “reasonably close.”
• According to the TASS news agency, President Trump also stated to reporters in Davos that he wanted to see powerful people join the initiative.
• Putin stated on Wednesday that the Russian foreign minister would respond to Putin’s request to join the board in due course.
• Putin, who was cited by Russian news outlets as saying at a meeting of Russia’s Security Council, said he thought the proposed “board of peace” was primarily intended to deal with a Middle Eastern peace settlement and that Russia was willing to pay Trump for long-term board membership in exchange for $1 billion in Russian assets that had been frozen in the US due to its war against Ukraine.
• Rustem Umerov, the negotiator for Ukraine, announced on Telegram that he had a meeting with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president’s top envoys.
• Russian special envoy Kirill Dmitriev and Witkoff met on Wednesday in Davos, according to TASS, and Witkoff described the meeting as “very positive.”