Putin vows to ‘intensify’ strikes on Ukraine after deadly final week of 2023

President Vladimir Putin has said that Moscow will intensify strikes on military targets in Ukraine, after a deadly week in the conflict which saw both sides hitting each other with large-scale attacks.

Putin was speaking after a Ukrainian attack on Saturday on the Russian city of Belgorod which local officials said killed 25 people including five children. That strike followed Moscow’s large-scale attack on Ukrainian cities on Friday, killing more than 40 people and injuring 160.

“We’re going to intensify the strikes. No crime against civilians will rest unpunished, that’s for certain,” Putin said on Monday during a visit to a military hospital.

Putin said Moscow would continue to hit what he called “military installations”, however Russian strikes on Monday targeted a university and a museum.

Kyiv said Russia had targeted the country with a “record” number of drones on New Year’s Day, with Moscow launching 90 Iranian-made Shahed drones on the last night of the year, 87 of which were destroyed.

Two were killed in a drone attack on a two-storey residential building in the north-eastern Sumy region, the Ukrainian interior ministry said on Monday, with another person wounded.

Kyiv also said Russian shelling killed one person on New Year’s Day in the southern Odesa region and another person in Kherson, also in the south.

The barrage came after Russia pounded Ukraine in the last days of 2023 – killing 41 people in one of the biggest strikes in the war.

The escalating violence came as Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in an interview with The Economist that the notion that Russia was winning the nearly two-year-old war was only a “feeling” and that Moscow was still suffering heavy battlefield losses.

Zelenskiy provided no substantiation of his allegation on Russian losses. He said Ukraine’s priorities in 2024 included hitting Russia’s strengths in Crimea to reduce the number of attacks on his country as well as protecting key cities on the eastern front.

He acknowledged that Ukraine had perhaps “not succeed [in 2023] as the world wanted. Maybe not everything is as fast as someone imagined.” But he cited heavy Russian losses in the besieged eastern town of Avdiivka, which he visited last week as evidence that Russia was not “winning”.

“Thousands, thousands of killed Russian soldiers, nobody even took them away,” he told the magazine in the interview. In contrast, he hailed the “huge result” of Ukrainian forces breaking through a Russian Black Sea blockade, enabling grain exports by way of a new route along its southern coast.

With additional support for Ukraine facing obstacles in the United States and European Union, more efforts were needed to persuade the global leaders that defending Ukraine meant defending the world, he said.

Zelenskiy rejected any notion that Moscow was interested in peace talks, pointing to Moscow’s repeated waves of aerial strikes. “I see only the steps of a terrorist country,” he said.

Any Russian call for talks, he said, “is not because they are righteous men, but because they don’t have enough missiles, ammunition, or prepared troops.”

Speaking about the situation on the battlefield on Monday, Putin said he believed the “strategic initiative” in the drawn-out conflict in Ukraine was on the Russian side, since the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the summer.

He also claimed Moscow wanted to end the conflict – which has dragged on for almost two years – “as quickly as possible” but “only on our terms”.

Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report