Ukraine-Russia war latest: Trump sympathises with Putin’s stance on Nato as Kursk battle rages
Trump said he ‘understands’ Russia’s feelings about Ukraine in Nato bloc
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Your support makes all the difference.Donald Trump says he sympathises with Vladimir Putin’s position that Ukraine should not be part of Nato, incorrectly accusing Joe Biden of changing US policy on the issue.
“A big part of the problem is, Russia – for many, many years, long before Putin – said, ‘You could never have Nato involved with Ukraine.’ Now, they’ve said that. That’s been, like, written in stone,” Mr Trump said, speaking at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach.
“And somewhere along the line Biden said, ‘No. They should be able to join Nato’ Well, then Russia has somebody right on their doorstep, and I could understand their feelings about that.”
Nato’s official position since 2008 has been that Ukraine should work towards membership, and that remains the case. No new invitation to join Nato has been offered, despite calls from Kyiv for the alliance to do so.
On the battlefront, Ukraine said its forces were “commencing new offensive actions” in Russia’s western Kursk region, finally confirming the renewed assault first reported over the weekend.
And in eastern Ukraine, Kyiv said it was still clinging on to part of Kurakhove, a strategic town that Russia claims to have captured.
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West trying to smother Russia, Russian orthodox patriarch says
The patriarch of Russia’s orthodox church, celebrating Christmas alongside Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin, claimed that the Western world despised Russia and its “alternative path of civilised development”.
Orthodox Christians in Russia celebrate Christmas today, according to the Julian calendar.
Patriarch Kirill, an enthusiastic backer of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, blessed icons and crosses that were to be engraved with the president’s initials and sent to servicemen in the 34-month-old war in Ukraine, Russian news agencies quoted Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov as saying.
“They hate us because we are offering a different, alternative path of civilised development,” Kirill said at Christ the Saviour Cathedral, which was rebuilt on the site of a swimming pool in the 1990s after Soviet dictator Josef Stalin levelled it in the 1930s.
The West was in moral collapse, he claimed, while Russia showed the world how to blend science, culture, education and faith.
“Physically, they cannot really smother us, though they try through different types of slander and the creation of blocs of some sort intended to weaken Russia,” he said. “Nothing will work because God is with us.”
Russian drone kills one, injures nine in passenger bus in Kherson
A Russian drone attacked a civilian passenger bus in Ukraine’s southern city of Kherson yesterday, killing at least one person and injuring nine more, the Kherson regional governor said.
The bus with shattered windows and pools of blood on its floor could be seen on a video from the site, shared by the governor alongside his statement on Telegram.
A 49-year-old man was killed, the regional prosecutor’s office said.
Civilians in Kherson region, which Russian forces partially occupy, and its capital constantly come under Russian drone attacks. Local authorities report casualties from such strikes on an almost daily basis.
Russia claims it has captured another town in eastern Ukraine but Kyiv doesn't confirm the loss
Russia claims it has captured another town in eastern Ukraine but Kyiv doesn't confirm the loss
Russia’s Defense Ministry is claiming that its troops in eastern Ukraine have captured the town of Kurakhove after a monthslong battle
Why is Ukraine fighting to keep a piece of Kursk?
Over the weekend, Ukraine began a new offensive inside Russia to extend its incursion within Kursk oblast, an attack Kyiv has not yet acknowledged.
In a brief remark alluding to the events in Kursk, a senior Ukrainian official said Russia was “getting what it deserves” there.
Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukrainian forces had established a buffer zone and inflicted heavy losses in Kursk, preventing Moscow from deploying its troops in key areas of the eastern front.
Ukraine’s main achievement in the past five months of fighting has been its capture of territory inside Russia’s Kursk region, something it hopes could prove a bargaining chip in possible peace talks.
Independent military analyst Franz-Stefan Gady said Ukraine was trying to hold its pocket of Kursk for as long as possible, even as Russia continued to push deeper into eastern Ukraine.
“There’s a likelihood that we haven’t seen the main thrust of this Ukrainian offensive operation just yet,” he told Reuters. “We are essentially talking about platoon-sized, company-sized assaults with fairly limited gains thus far.” It remained to be seen if Kyiv’s forces could open up another axis of advance, Mr Gady added.
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