Russia has suffered huge human and material losses in Ukraine and its army will emerge weakened from the conflict, a senior German military figure said in an interview published on Friday.
The interview came as Kyiv is fighting to maintain western support for its war against Russian forces, which invaded in February 2022, AFP reports.
Christian Freuding, who oversees the German army’s support for Kyiv, told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper:
You know that according to western intelligence figures, 300,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or so seriously wounded that they can no longer be mobilised for the war.
Leaked US intelligence earlier this month indicated that 315,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded in Ukraine since the war began.
Freuding, who is also a key adviser to the German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, said:
The Russian losses of men and material are enormous.
Russia is also believed to have lost thousands of battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, he added.
He said:
The Russian armed forces will emerge from this war weakened, both materially and in terms of personnel.
However, Russia is succeeding in continuing to recruit troops “including the use of prisoners”, Freuding said.
And, of course, we are seeing massive investments in the arms industry.
The German general acknowledged that Russia was demonstrating a greater “resilience” than western allies had expected at the start of the war.
We perhaps did not see, or did not want to see, that they are in a position to continue to be supplied by allies.
Russia launched a wave of missile strikes on Friday across Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, killing at least two people and wounding 18, officials said.
Several powerful explosions in the early hours of Friday, AFP reports, while thick black smoke was seen billowing from a warehouse.
“We haven’t seen so much red on our monitors for a long time,” said Yuriy Ignat, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s air force, explaining that Russian forces had first launched a wave of suicide drones followed by missiles.
Presidential aide Andriy Yermak said on Telegram:
There are people killed by Russian missiles today that were launched at civilian facilities, civilian buildings.
We are doing everything to strengthen our air shield. But the world needs to see that we need more support and strength to stop this terror.
The Kyiv mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said the capital’s air defences were working intensively and seven people had been hospitalised.
A metro station, whose platforms were being used as an air raid shelter, was damaged, he said.
Sergiy Popko, the head of Kyiv’s military administration, said a warehouse with an area of about 3,000 sq metres (32,300 sq ft) was burning in the northern Podil district.
He said:
There are many wounded, the number is being clarified.
In other districts of the city, an uninhabited multistorey block of flats also caught fire and a private house was damaged, Popko said.
In the central Shevchenko district, a residential building was damaged and there was also a fire in a warehouse with six believed to be injured, Popko said.
Klitschko wrote on social media that there appeared to be three people still under rubble of the warehouse while three others had been rescued.
The overnight attacks came days after Ukraine struck a Russian warship in the occupied Crimean port of Feodosia in a major setback for the Russian navy.
Drones and missiles struck at least five other Ukrainian cities on Friday, including Kharkiv in the northeast, Lviv in the west, Dnipro in the east and Odesa in the south, the cities’ mayors and police said.
Igor Terekhov, mayor of Kharkiv, said on television:
So far we have counted 22 strikes in different districts of Kharkiv.
There are currently seven injured in hospital. Unfortunately one person has died.
In Lviv, governor Maksym Kozytsky said that “one person was killed and three wounded”.
In Dnipro, the mayor, Borys Filatov, said there were injured and dead. The health ministry said that a maternity hospital in the city had been “severely damaged”.
In the southern port of Odesa, a high-rise building caught fire after being struck by debris from a downed drone, the city’s mayor said.
Mayor Gennadiy Trukhanov said on social media:
As a result of another enemy attack, one of the high-rise buildings was damaged. The fire was promptly extinguished.
Ukraine’s southern command said 14 attack drones had been destroyed in the south of the country and there were no casualties reported.
The attacks came after Kremlin on Tuesday acknowledged a Ukrainian missile attack had damaged one of its warships.
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine.
Russia has launched a wave of missile strikes across Ukrainian cities, including the capital, authorities said as they raised a nationwide air alert.
The Kharkiv mayor, Igor Terekhov, described the assault on Kharkiv as “a massive missile attack” while regional police reported 10 explosions and said the city had been hit with S-300 missiles.
Explosions were reported in Kyiv, city mayor Vitali Klitschko said in a post on Telegram, and officials say a residential building and a warehouse were set on fire by falling debris.
Missile attacks were also reported in Lviv in the country’s west and Odesa in the south as well as Sumy and Konotop.
More on that soon. In other developments:
A Panama-flagged bulk carrier that was heading to the River Danube port to load grain hit a Russian mine in the Black Sea, injuring two crew members, Ukrainian officials said. The incident that took place on Wednesday was the latest instance of a civilian vessel hitting an explosive in the Black Sea.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy thanked the US for releasing the last remaining package of weapons available for Ukraine under existing authorisation, as uncertainty surrounds further aid to Kyiv. “To defend freedom and security not only in Ukraine and Europe but also in the United States, we must continue to respond to ongoing Russian aggression,” he said on social media.
A Moscow court sentenced two men to several years in prison for taking part in the recital of verses against the Ukraine campaign during an anti-mobilisation protest last year. Artyom Kamardin, 33, received a seven-year sentence for reciting a poem, and Yegor Shtovba, 23, was sentenced to five and a half years for attending the protest.
Ukraine’s Airborne Assault Troops said that three servicemen who Ukrainian prosecutors have said were captured and shot dead by Russian forces this month were members of the 82nd Airborne Assault Brigade. Russia has yet to comment on the allegation, the second accusation that it has killed prisoners of war levelled against it this month by Ukrainian prosecutors. Footage shared on social media of the alleged incident appears to show three unarmed figures collapsing from a stationary position after being fired upon.
Belarus’s authoritarian president attended a meeting with children brought from Russia-controlled areas of Ukraine, openly defying international outrage over his country’s involvement in Moscow’s deportation of Ukrainian children. Speaking at the event marking the arrival of a new group of Ukrainian children ahead of the New Year holiday, President Alexander Lukashenko vowed to “embrace these children, bring them to our home, keep them warm and make their childhood happier”.
An investigation by the Associated Press newswire found that Russian occupation authorities vastly and deliberately undercounted the dead after the flooding that followed the catastrophic explosion that destroyed the Kakhovka Dam in the southern Kherson region in June. Russia said 59 people drowned in the territory it controls. But AP determined the number is at least 200 to 300 in one town alone.
Ukraine and Hungary are preparing a meeting of Zelenskiy and prime minister Viktor Orbán in the near future, the Ukrainian president’s chief of staff said, amid recent steps by Hungary that have soured ties. Andriy Yermak said on X he had had a “productive phone call” with Hungarian foreign minister Peter Szijjarto and that they had also discussed Ukraine’s progress on its path to European integration.
A fire broke out at a multi-story building in the Black Sea port city of Odesa late on Thursday after drones were reported to be headed for the area, authorities said. Oleh Kiper, the regional governor, said in a post on Telegram that information about casualties was being verified and urged townspeople to stay in shelters amid an ongoing drone attack.
Shelling killed two civilians and wounded five others in a village on the banks of the frontline Dnipro river in southern Ukraine, local authorities said. “Russian armed forces carried out artillery shelling of the village of Bilenke of Zaporizhzhia Region,” Ukraine’s general prosecutor said.
Zelenskiy said that Ukraine’s alternative Black Sea export corridor – introduced after Russia withdrew from a UN-brokered deal to guarantee safe shipment of Ukrainian grain in July – had sent out 12m tonnes of cargo so far. He added in his nightly video address that the corridor had produced “particularly significant results for December, and this is felt at the level of our entire economy.”
Zelenskiy said he discussed Ukraine’s peace formula in a call with Pope Francis. “Over 80 countries are already involved in this process at the level of their representatives. And there will be more of them,” Zelenskiy said in a post on X.