Ukraine Update…661 days into the Russian move on Ukraine…

• A Russian drone attack hit a residential building and injured one person in Kyiv on Thursday, authorities said, in a rare breach of the Ukrainian capital’s air defences. Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Telegram that the incident occurred in the Solomianskyi district, reporting “flames on the upper floors” and one man admitted to hospital.

• President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukraine was receiving signals that Russia’s military planning and activity were slowing. “The enemy’s plans, the work of the Russian defence [industry]. There are signals indicating a slowdown. We will continue to support their slowdown,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address, citing a military intelligence directorate (HUR) report. It was not immediately clear whether the president was referring specifically to the Russian defence industry or to Russian tactics and objectives in a broader sense.

• Russia has launched about 7,400 missiles and 3,700 Shahed attack drones at targets in Ukraine during its 22-month-old invasion, Kyiv said, illustrating the vast scale of Moscow’s aerial assaults. Ukrainian air defences were able to shoot down 1,600 of the missiles and 2,900 of the drones, air force spokesperson Yuriy Ihnat said in televised comments.

• Ukraine has received the last €1.5bn euro ($1.65bn) tranche from the €18 bn package from the European Union for 2023, prime minister Denys Shmyhal said. “Hope for continued unwavering support from the EU,” Shmyhal said on X. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán last week blocked a €50bn EU aid package for Ukraine.

• Orbán insisted on calling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a “military operation”, mirroring language used by the Kremlin. “It is a military operation … as long as there is no declaration of war between the two countries,” the nationalist leader told reporters during his annual press conference. “When the Russians declare war on Ukraine, then it will be war.

• Orbán also said he had accepted an invitation from Zelenskiy to hold a bilateral meeting in the future, a potential first between the two leaders since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Orbán said he agreed to Zelenskiy’s proposal during a brief conversation on the sidelines of the swearing-in ceremony for Argentina’s new president earlier this month. “[Zelenskiy] said, ‘We should negotiate,’ and I told him I’d be at his disposal. We just have to clarify one question: about what?” Orbán said.

• Russia issued an arrest warrant for Maria Pevchikh, a longtime ally of jailed opposition figure Alexei Navalny who has not been seen for over two weeks. The Kremlin has doubled down on its repression of Russia’s already-weakened civil society, since ordering troops into Ukraine early last year.

• Ukraine’s parliament voted this week to legalise medical marijuana, after the war with Russia left thousands of people with post-traumatic stress disorder that many believe could be eased by the drug, the AP reported. The new law, which will come into effect in six months’ time and which also allows cannabis to be used for scientific and industrial ends, passed by 248 votes in the 401-seat parliament in Kyiv.

• Exports of goods from Russia to China will reach a record of more than $110bn in 2023, Russian first deputy prime minister Andrei Belousov said. Moscow has deepened its already close ties with China to try to offset western sanctions imposed over what Russia calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine.

• Ukraine and a group of its western creditors signed an agreement on Thursday to extend through March 2027 a debt payment suspension first agreed in September 2022, the Ukrainian finance ministry said. “I am grateful to our partners from the G7 countries for understanding Ukraine’s needs in the time of war,” Ukraine’s minister of finance Sergii Marchenko said in a statement.

• Ukraine Russian shelling had left three people dead and several more injured at coal mining facilities in Toretsk, a town in the war-battered eastern Donetsk region. The region has seen the brunt of fighting of Russia’s nearly two-year invasion, and the Kremlin claimed to have annexed it along with three other eastern and southern territories last year.

• Ukrainian infrastructure minister Oleksandr Kubrakov said he had met with his newly appointed counterpart in Poland to discuss a cargo blockage on their shared border by Polish truckers. The truckers have been blocking the border for over a month to demand the reintroduction of restrictions to enter the European Union for their Ukrainian….

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The failure of Russian operations in Ukraine to achieve Russian President Vladimir Putin’s maximalist objectives thus far is not a permanent condition, and only continued Western support for Ukraine can ensure that Putin’s maximalist objectives remain unattainable. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated on December 20 that Putin has already failed to achieve his principal objective of “erasing [Ukraine] from the map and subsuming it into Russia.” The Russian military has failed to force Ukraine to capitulate to Putin’s maximalist objectives to replace the Ukrainian government with one acceptable to the Kremlin under veiled calls for “denazification,” to destroy Ukraine’s ability to resist any future Kremlin demands under calls for “demilitarization,” and to prohibit Ukraine’s right to choose its own diplomatic and military partnerships under calls for Ukrainian “neutrality.”