BRUSSELS — A coalition of European left parties has launched a call for signatures to force the European Commission to suspend the EU’s association agreement with Israel over Gaza. Despite a U.S.-brokered ceasefire agreement in October, Israel has kept attacking targets in the Gaza Strip with airstrikes, drones and tanks, prompting the pro-Palestinian movement to renew its calls for the EU to take action against Israel. The coalition — led by France’s La France Insoumise, Spain’s Podemos, Portugal’s Bloco de Esquerda, and Nordic left parties — has launched a European Citizens Initiative titled “Justice for Palestine” calling on the EU executive suspend ties with Israel over its “genocide against the Palestinian population, and its ongoing violations of international law and human rights.” If the initiative receives a million signatures from at least seven EU counties — a likely outcome given the popularity of the issue — the Commission will be forced to state which actions, if any, it will take in respond to the initiative. “The EU pretends everything is back to normal, but we will not turn a blind eye to what is happening in Gaza,” said MEP Manon Aubry, the leader of La France Insoumise, adding the “EU is helping to finance genocide” by not suspending trade relations with Israel. More than 100 children have been killed since the ceasefire agreement was signed in March, UNICEF said Tuesday. The Commission already proposed in November to suspend some parts of the association agreement and to sanction some “extremist ministers” in the cabinet of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But parts of the package were never implemented because they required unanimous approval from EU countries. After the ceasefire was reached the Commission proposed withdrawing the measures; the issue has remained frozen ever since. Foreign ministers from numerous EU countries as well as the U.K., Norway, Canada and Japan sharply criticized an Israeli decision to bar 37 international non-governmental organizations from providing aid to Gaza. The humanitarian situation in the besieged territory remains dire, with many living outdoors in winter weather. Four people were killed on Tuesday when a storm caused buildings that had been damaged in the war to collapse, according to local media.

LONDON — The U.K. and Poland have agreed to cooperate more closely to shoot down air and missile threats, as they seek to strengthen the protection of their skies. The two NATO allies will step up joint training of helicopter pilots and work together on new capabilities to counter attacks from the air. British and Polish military personnel will train together in virtual environments to improve air defense techniques, while eight Polish military helicopter pilots will undertake training in the U.K. under NATO’s military aviation program. Two Polish helicopter instructors will be permanently stationed at RAF Shawbury in the West Midlands for a full rotational tour. The announcement came during a visit by Polish President Karol Nawrocki to Downing Street on Tuesday. U.K. Defense Secretary, John Healey, hailed Poland as “a crucial ally for the U.K. in this era of rising threats” and said together they were “stepping up to defend Europe and face down the threat from (Vladimir) Putin.” British fighter jets conducted an air defense mission over Poland as part of an allied response to Russian drone incursions into Polish airspace, with pilots from the two countries flying together as part of NATO’s Eastern Sentry mission. Healey announced last year that British armed forces would get fresh powers to bring down suspicious drones over military sites as part of the Armed Forces Bill, amid a spate of aerial incursions across Europe. Ministers have committed to improving the U.K.’s aerial defenses, following concerns that it is increasingly vulnerable given the changing nature of threats from the air. The U.K. and Poland have cooperated extensively on air defense in the past, including a £1.9 billion export agreement announced in April 2023 to equip 22 Polish air defense batteries, and a separate deal worth over £4 billion to continue the next phase of Poland’s future air defense programme, Narew. 

KYIV — Russia’s relentless assault killed at least 2,500 civilians and injured 12,000 in Ukraine last year, according to a new report published this week. Those figures made it the deadliest year for Ukraine’s civilian population since the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission said. The U.N. monitors included only deaths and injuries they were able to verify, noting the total dead and injured toll in 2025 was still 31 percent higher than in 2024, and 70 percent higher than in 2023. The vast majority of casualties, around 97 percent, occurred in Ukraine-controlled territory due to attacks launched by Russian armed forces. Russia’s army increased its efforts to capture Ukraine’s eastern and southern regions in 2025, with the campaign resulting in the killing and injuring of civilians, destruction of infrastructure and new waves of displacement. The aggression continues as Russian leader Vladimir Putin brushes off U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to end the war. More than 9,000 people were injured in 2025 in frontline areas, with the elderly most affected. Civilian casualties by short-range drones increased by 120 percent last year, with 577 people killed and more than 3000 injured by FPV drone attacks, compared to 226 killed and 1,528 injured in 2024.  Russian Ambassador to the U.N. Vasilii Nebendzia denied that Russia ever targets civilians, blaming Ukrainian air defense for the death toll during the U.N. Security Council meeting on Monday.   Russia attacked Ukraine with more than 20 different missiles and 293 killer drones on Monday night, killing four and injuring six people in Kharkiv alone, said local governor Oleh Synehubov.  The Kremlin has bombarded Ukraine’s energy system during freezing temperatures, leaving hundreds of thousands of families without heating and electricity. “Every such strike against life is a reminder that support for Ukraine cannot be stopped. Missiles for air defense systems are needed every day, and especially during winter,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Tuesday. “The world can respond to this Russian terror with new assistance packages for Ukraine. We expect the acceleration of deliveries already agreed with America and Europe. Russia must come to learn that cold will not help it win the war,” Zelenskyy added.

KYIV — The Russian army attacked Ukraine with more than 90 killer drones in the early hours of Thursday morning, causing complete blackouts in the key industrial regions of Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv’s energy ministry reported. “While energy workers managed to restore power in the Zaporizhzhia region in the morning, some 800,000 households in the nearby Dnipro region were still without electricity and heating on Thursday morning,” Artem Nekrasov, acting energy minister of Ukraine, said during a morning briefing. In Dnipro, eight coal mines stopped working because of a power outage. All the miners were safely evacuated to the surface, Nekrasov added. Power outages were also reported in Chernihiv, Kyiv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Poltava and other regions. Freezing weather is coming to Ukraine over the next three days, with temperatures forecast to drop to minus 20° C during the night, when Russia often launches massive missile and drone attacks. Precipitation and cold could cause additional electricity supply disruptions due to snow accumulating on power lines, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said Wednesday evening. “Ukraine’s energy system is under enemy attack every day, and energy workers work in extremely difficult conditions to provide people with light and heat. Deteriorating weather conditions create additional stress on critical infrastructure. We are working to minimize the consequences of bad weather,” Svyrydenko added. Local governors in the eastern regions of Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro reported that hospitals and other critical infrastructure had to turn to emergency power supplies because of the latest Russian attack. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy thanked Ukrainian energy workers for the speedy power restoration in Zaporizhzhia, and used the opportunity to remind Kyiv’s partners around the world they need to respond “to this deliberate torment of the Ukrainian people by Russia.” “There is absolutely no military rationale in such strikes on the energy sector and infrastructure that leave people without electricity and heating in wintertime. This is Russia’s war specifically against our people, against life in Ukraine — an attempt to break Ukraine,” Zelenskyy added.

LONDON — Britain stepped up a promise to send troops into Ukraine — and left open a host of questions about how it will all work in practice. At a meeting of the “coalition of the willing” in Paris this week, the U.K. and France signed a “declaration of intent” to station forces in Ukraine as part of a multinational bid to support any ceasefire deal with Russia. It builds on months of behind-the-scenes planning by civil servants and military personnel eager to put heft behind any agreement. Despite promising a House of Commons vote, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has so far shared very little information publicly about how the operation might work and what its terms of engagement will be, at a time when Britain’s armed forces are already under significant strain. This lack of transparency has begun to raise alarm bells in defense circles. Ed Arnold of think tank the Royal United Services Institute has described the U.K. as being in “a really dangerous position,” while retired commander Tim Collins said any peacekeeping mission would not be credible without higher defense spending. Even Nigel Farage was in on the action Wednesday — the populist leader of Britain’s Reform UK party said he couldn’t sign up to the plan in its current form, and predicted the country could only keep its commitments going “for six or eight weeks.” Here are the key questions still lingering for Starmer’s government. HAS THE UK GOT ENOUGH TROOPS? In France, Emmanuel Macron is at least starting to get into the numbers. The French president gave a televised address Tuesday in which he said France envisaged sending “several thousands” of troops to Ukrainian territory. But Starmer has given no equivalent commitment. Under pressure in the House of Commons, the British prime minster defended that position Wednesday, saying the size of the deployment would depend on the nature of the ceasefire agreed between Russia and Ukraine. However, analysts say it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which a deployment does not place a genuine strain on the U.K.’s military. The country’s strategic defense review, published last year, stressed that the Britain’s armed forces have dwindled in strength since the Cold War, leaving “only a small set of forces ready to deploy at any given moment. The latest figures from the Ministry of Defence put the number of medically-deployable troops at 99,162. Figures including former head of the army Richard Dannatt and Matthew Savill, director of military sciences at RUSI, have warned that a new deployment in Ukraine would mean pulling away from existing operations. There is also a hefty question mark over how long troops might be deployed for, and whether they might be taking on an open-ended commitment of the kind that snarled Britain for years in Afghanistan. RUSI’s Arnold said positioning troops in Ukraine could be “bigger” than deployments in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Libya, “not necessarily in numbers, but in terms of the consequences… This mission absolutely can’t fail. And if it’s a mission that can’t fail, it needs to be absolutely watertight.” WHAT HAPPENS IF RUSSIA ACTUALLY ATTACKS? Ministers have refused to be drawn so far on the expectations placed on troops who might be stationed in Ukraine as part of the plan. They have instead placed an emphasis on the U.K.’s role as part of a “reassurance” force, providing air and maritime support, with ground activity focused on training Ukrainian soldiers, and have not specified what would happen if British troops came under direct threat. The latest figures from the Ministry of Defence put the number of medically-deployable troops at 99,162. | Pool photo by Jason Alden/EPA That’s already got Kyiv asking questions. “Would all the COW partners give a strong response if Russia attacks again? That’s a hard question. I ask all of them, and I still have not gotten a clear answer,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters via WhatsApp chat on Wednesday. “I see political will. I see partners being ready to give us strong sanctions, security guarantees. But until we have legally binding security guarantees, approved by parliaments, by the U.S. Congress, we cannot answer the question if partners are ready to protect us,” Zelenskyy added. Richard Shirreff, former deputy supreme commander of NATO in Europe, told LBC: “This can’t be a lightly armed ‘blue beret’-type peacekeeping force … enforcing peace means being prepared to overmatch the Russians, and that means also being prepared to fight them if necessary.” A U.K. military official, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said: “There is no point in troops being there if they’re not prepared to fight.” Asked if British troops could return fire if they came under attack from Russia, a Downing Street spokesman said Wednesday afternoon that they would not comment on “operational hypothetical scenarios.”  Ministers have refused to be drawn so far on the expectations placed on troops who might be stationed in Ukraine as part of the plan. | Tolga Akmen/EPA Returning fire might even be one of the simpler possibilities for the army to contemplate, with less clarity over how peacekeeping forces could respond to other types of hostile activity designed to destabilize a ceasefire, such as drone incursions or attempted hacking. WILL THE US REALLY PROVIDE A BACKSTOP? Starmer has long stressed that U.K. military involvement will depend on the U.S. offering back-up. John Foreman, a former British defense attaché in Moscow and Kyiv, said it was right for the multinational force to focus on support for Ukraine’s own forces, pointing out: “It was never going to be able to provide credible security guarantees — only the U.S. with perhaps key allies can do this.” While Washington has inched forward in its apparent willingness to provide security guarantees — including warm words from Donald Trump’s top envoys in Paris Tuesday — they are by no means set in stone.  The final statement, which emerged from Tuesday’s meeting, was watered down from an earlier draft, removing references to American participation in the multinational force for Ukraine, including with “U.S. capabilities such as intelligence and logistics, and with a U.S. commitment to support the force if it is attacked.” This will only add to fears that the U.K. is talking beyond its capabilities and is overly optimistic about the behavior of its allies. Government officials pushed back against the accusation that British military plans lack substance, arguing that it would be “irresponsible” to share specific operational details prematurely. That position could be difficult to maintain for long.

With his lightning raid to snatch Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, U.S. President Donald Trump has shown that President Vladimir Putin’s self-proclaimed “multipolar” world of anti-Western dictatorial alliances from Caracas to Tehran is essentially toothless. Beyond the humiliation of the world seeing that Putin isn’t a dependable ally when the chips are down — something already witnessed in Nagorno-Karabakh, Syria and Iran — there’s now also the added insult that Trump appears more effective and bolder in pulling off the sort of maverick superpower interventions the Kremlin wishes it could achieve. In short, Putin has been upstaged at being a law unto himself. While the Russian leader would presumably have loved to remove Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a blitz attack, he’s instead been locked in a brutal war for four years, suffering over 1 million Russian dead and wounded. “Putin must be unbearably jealous [of Trump],” political analyst and former Kremlin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov told POLITICO. “What Putin promised to do in Ukraine, Trump did in half an hour [in Venezuela].” The sense that Moscow has lost face was one of the few things independent analysts and Russia’s ultranationalists seemed to agree on.    Discussing the Caracas raid on his Telegram account, the nationalist spy-turned-soldier and war blogger Igor Girkin, now jailed in a penal colony, wrote: “We’ve suffered another blow to our image. Another country that was counting on Russia’s help hasn’t received it.” UNRELIABLE ALLY For years, Russia has sought to project itself as the main force resisting American-led Western hegemony, pioneering an alliance loosely united by the idea of a common enemy in Washington. Under Putin, Russia presented itself as the chief proponent of this “multipolar” world, which like the Soviet Union would help defend those in its camp.  Invading Ukraine in 2022, Moscow called upon its allies to rally to its side.  They largely heeded the call. Iran sold Russia drones. China and India bought its oil. The leaders of those countries in Latin America and Africa, with less to offer economically and militarily, gave symbolic support that lent credence to Moscow’s claim it wasn’t an international pariah and in fact had plenty of friends.  Recent events, however, have shown those to be a one-way friendships to the benefit of Moscow. Russia, it appears, won’t be riding to the rescue. The first to realise that cozying up to Russia had been a waste of time were the Armenians. Distracted by the Ukraine war, Moscow didn’t lift a finger to stop Azerbaijan from seizing the ethnic-Armenian region of Nagorno-Karabakh in a lightning war in 2023. Russian peacekeepers just stood by.   A year later, the Kremlin was similarly helpless as it watched the collapse of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, which it had propped up for years. Russia even had to abandon Tartous, its vital port on the Mediterranean. Moscow didn’t lift a finger to stop Azerbaijan from seizing the ethnic-Armenian region of Nagorno-Karabakh in a lightning war in 2023. | Anthony Pizzoferrato/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images Further undermining its status in the Middle East, Russia was unable to help Iran when Israel and the U.S. last year bombed the Islamic Republic at will. Russia has long been an important strategic partner to Iran in nuclear technology, but it had no answer to the overwhelming display of military aviation used to strike Iran’s atomic facilities. Now, Venezuela, another of Putin’s longtime allies, has been humiliated, eliciting haughty condemnation (but no action) from Moscow. GREEN WITH ENVY Moscow’s energy and military ties to Caracas run deep. Since 1999 Russia has supplied more than $20 billion in military equipment — financed through loans and secured in part by control over Venezuela’s oil industry — investments that will now be of little avail to Moscow. Maduro’s capture is particularly galling for the Russians, as in the past they have managed to whisk their man to safety — securing a dacha after your escape being among the attractions of any dictator’s pact with Russia. But while ousted Ukrainian leader Viktor Yakunovych and Assad secured refuge in Russia, Maduro on Monday appeared in a New York court dressed in prison garb. Russian officials, predictably, have denounced the American attack. Russia’s foreign ministry described it as “an unacceptable violation of the sovereignty of an independent state,” while senator Alexei Puskov said Trump’s actions heralded a return to the “wild imperialism of the 19th century.” Sovereignty violations and anachronistic imperialism, of course, are exactly what the Russians themselves are accused of in Ukraine.   There has also been the usual saber-rattling.  “All of Russia is asking itself why we don’t deal with our enemies in a similar way,” wrote Aleksandr Dugin, a prominent ultranationalist | Matt Cardy/Getty Images Alexei Zhuravlev, deputy chairman of Russia’s parliamentary defense committee, said Russia should consider providing Venezuela with a nuclear-capable Oreshnik missile.  And the military-themed channel ‘Two Majors,’ which has more than 1.2 million followers, posted on Telegram that “Washington’s actions have effectively given Moscow free rein to resolve its own issues by any means necessary.” (As if Moscow had not been doing so already.) The more optimistic quarters of the Russian camp argue that Trump’s actions in Caracas show international law has been jettisoned, allowing Moscow to justify its own behavior. Others suggest, despite evidence to the contrary in the Middle East, that Trump is adhering to the 19th century Monroe Doctrine and will be content to focus on dominance of the Americas, leaving Russia to its old European and Central Asian spheres of influence. In truth, however, Putin has followed the might-is-right model for years. What’s embarrassing is that he hasn’t proving as successful at it as Trump. Indeed, the dominant emotion among Russia’s nationalists appears to be envy, both veiled and undisguised.  “All of Russia is asking itself why we don’t deal with our enemies in a similar way,” wrote Aleksandr Dugin, a prominent ultranationalist. Russia, he continued, should take a leaf out of Trump’s playbook. “Do like Trump, do it better than Trump. And faster.” Pro-Kremlin mouthpiece Margarita Simonyan was even more explicit, saying there was reason to “be jealous.” Various pro-Kremlin commentators also noted tartly that, unlike Russia, the U.S. was unlikely to face repercussions in the form of international sanctions or being “cancelled.”  To many in Russia, Trump’s audacious move is likely to confirm, rather than upend their world view, said Gallyamov, the analyst. Russian officials and state media have long proclaimed that the world is ruled by strength rather than laws. The irony, though, is that Trump is showing himself to be more skillful at navigating the law of the jungle than Putin. “Putin himself created a world where the only thing that matters is success,” Gallyamov added. “And now the Americans have shown how it’s done, while Putin’s humiliation is obvious for everyone to see.” 

KYIV – General Vasyl Malyuk, chief of the Security Service of Ukraine or SBU, resigned from his post on Monday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appointed Major General Yevhen Khmara, head of the top counterintelligence agency’s special operations force Alfa, to serve as the acting head of the entire SBU, reads the decree published on Monday. “Yevhen Khmara is an experienced special forces officer who has been serving in the Special Operations Center ‘A’ of the SBU since 2011, and in 2023 was appointed head of Alfa,” the SBU press service said. Fighters of the Special Operations Center “A” of the SBU conduct unique special operations to destroy military facilities in the deep rear of Russia — airfields, weapons warehouses and arsenals, oil refineries, and factories producing bombs and drones, and other significant targets. Khmara was an architect of Ukraine’s liberation of Snake Island in the Black Sea in 2022. POLITICO first reported that Malyuk was Zelenskyy’s next target as part of an ongoing government reshuffle. But unlike other top spies, Malyuk fought to stay in the SBU, with several Ukrainian military top commanders publicly urging Zelenskyy to let him continue successful operations against Russia, claiming he was effective where he was. Zelenskyy wanted to offer him a top post either at Ukraine’s foreign intelligence service or at the national security council. However, on Monday, it was announced that Malyuk will indeed remain within the SBU but not in the very top position. “I am leaving the position of Head of the Security Service. I will remain within the SBU system to implement world-class asymmetric special operations that will continue to cause maximum damage to the enemy,” Malyuk said in a statement on Monday, refusing to specify his new position. Zelenskyy explained the need for “rotation of everybody” to strengthen the country’s negotiating stance and resilience in the face of what’s coming. “Our country has two paths. The first path is peaceful, diplomatic, and it is a priority for us today. We want to end the war. At some point, if Russia blocks it and the partners do not force Russia to stop the war, there will be another path — to defend ourselves. And at this point, fresh forces will be needed. I will go through a parallel reboot of all structures. Just in case,” Zelenskyy told reporters during a press briefing on Saturday. On Monday, Zelenskyy met with several other top SBU officials to discuss the agency’s future.

KYIV — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is planning to remove Vasyl Malyuk as head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the state’s top counterintelligence agency, as part of an ongoing government reshuffle. The reshuffle has already seen two other top spies — Kyrylo Budanov and Oleh Ivashchenko — shifted to other responsibilities. Budanov has agreed to head the president’s office, while Ivashchenko will be chief of the HUR military intelligence service. Malyuk is said to be fighting to retain his post. “There are attempts to remove Malyuk, but nothing has been decided yet,” a Ukrainian official told POLITICO on Saturday. “Talks are still going on. But if Malyuk is out of SBU, this will seriously weaken Ukraine’s ability to protect itself,” added the official, who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “Malyuk is in his place, and the results of the security service prove it. It was he who turned the SBU into an effective special service that conducts unique special operations and gives Ukraine strong ‘cards’ at the negotiating table,” the official said. Enigmatic Malyuk, 42, has been managing the SBU since 2023. Since he was officially appointed by the parliament, he has overseen some of the agency’s high-profile assassinations and most daring special operations inside Russia, like the 2025 operation “Spiderweb” in which Ukrainian drones hit Russia’s strategic bombers on several protected airfields, causing $7 billion in damage to Russian military aviation. Neither Malyuk nor Zelenskyy responded to requests for comment. The SBU press service and the president’s office refused to comment. Holos Yaroslav Zheleznyak, a Ukrainian MP from the opposition party, said that Zelenskyy did not plan to fire Malyuk, but to offer him a new job. The Ukrainian leader has offered Malyuk a post at the Foreign Intelligence Service, which Ivashchenko used to head, or at the National Security Council of Ukraine, now headed by Rustem Umerov. POLITICO confirmed that information through other Ukrainian officials.  Before the final decision on Malyuk, Zelenskyy also offered to make Mykhailo Fedorov, currently deputy prime minister and minister of digital transformation, the new defense minister. “Mykhailo is deeply involved in the issues related to the Drone Line and works very effectively on digitalizing public services and processes,” Zelenskyy said in an evening address to the nation late Friday. “Together with all our military, the army command, national weapons producers, and Ukraine’s partners, we must implement defense-sector changes,” he added. Fedorov has so far issued no public comments on whether he will accept the new post. The Ukrainian parliament would have to formally appoint him and dismiss Denys Shmyhal, who has served as defense minister and also as prime minister in Zelenskyy’s war-time government. Zelenskyy thanked Shmyhal and said he will stay in the team. The Ukrainian official quoted above praised the performance of the SBU under Malyuk. “No other security structure currently has such results as the SBU. Why change those?” the official said. “The Kremlin will open the champagne if Malyuk is dismissed from his post.”

Ukraine’s foreign intelligence service warned Friday that the Kremlin was likely to carry out a false flag attack inside Russia or inside the Ukrainian territories it illegally occupies to derail peace talks mediated by U.S. President Donald Trump. Kyiv has already accused Moscow of lying about an alleged Ukrainian drone attack against the residence of Russian President Vladimir Putin in order to disrupt the peace process, and is now warning the Russians are likely to seek to up the stakes further with a staged high-casualty attack in the run-up to Russian Orthodox Christmas on Jan. 7. The spy service said it based its warning on its observation of the Kremlin building up for a heightened disinformation campaign. “We predict with high probability a transition from manipulative influence to the [Russian Federation] special services’ armed provocation, resulting in significant human casualties,” the intelligence service said in a statement. “The location of the provocation may be a religious building or other object of high symbolic significance both in [Russia] and in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine,” the statement read. The spy service said the Kremlin intended to pin the attacks on Ukraine by deploying Western-made drones brought from the front line to the site of the faked attack. Such operations are “consistent with modus operandi of Russian special services,” the Ukrainian secret service continued. “Putin’s regime has repeatedly used this tactic within the [Russian Federation], and now this same model is being exported abroad, as indirectly confirmed by public statements from senior Russian officials,” the intelligence service added. A series of attacks widely viewed as an example of this tactic are the apartment bombings in 1999 that struck the Russian cities of Moscow, Buynaksk, and Volgodonsk, killing more than 300 people and injuring more than 1,000. The attacks, officially blamed on Chechen militants, were used to launch a new war in Chechnya, and boost Putin’s popularity ahead of elections.

Moscow doubled down Wednesday on its claims that a Ukrainian drone had targeted President Vladimir Putin’s residence, even as Kyiv denied the allegations and announced fresh strikes on Russian fuel infrastructure on New Year’s Eve. The Kremlin insisted that Ukrainian drones had attempted to strike Putin’s residence on the shores of Lake Valdai between Moscow and St. Petersburg late Monday. On Wednesday, Russia’s Defense Ministry released video footage purportedly showing a downed drone lying in the snow in a forested area at night. The ministry said the footage depicted an attempt “to strike an aircraft-type UAV on the territory of a protected facility,” but provided no evidence confirming the incident had occurred near Putin’s residence. POLITICO was not able to verify the details of the video. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov claimed on Monday that the alleged attack had involved more than 90 long-range drones and warned that Moscow’s position in U.S.-led peace talks would harden as a result. Ukraine flatly rejected the claim, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy calling it “another lie from the Russian Federation” and accusing Moscow of manufacturing a provocation to derail diplomatic momentum. Residents of the nearby town of Valdai told Russian independent media Mozhem Obyasnit that they had heard no explosions or signs of an overnight attack. Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service had previously warned that Moscow was preparing a disinformation operation aimed at derailing Zelenskyy’s progress in talks with U.S. President Donald Trump by blaming Ukraine for an alleged attack on Putin’s residence while presenting no credible evidence. Western officials also expressed skepticism. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas accused Moscow of spreading “unfounded claims,” describing the alleged attack as a “deliberate distraction” by which “Moscow aims to derail real progress towards peace by Ukraine and its Western partners.” U.S. officials struck a cautious note, with Washington’s ambassador to NATO, Matthew Whitaker, saying on Tuesday it was unclear whether the incident had occurred. U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday that he was unhappy about the reports after speaking with Putin, but acknowledged that their veracity had yet to be established. While Russia called attention to the alleged threat to its president, Ukraine confirmed it had carried out a long-range strike deep inside Russian territory. In the early hours of Wednesday, drones operated by the Security Service of Ukraine’s Alpha Special Operations Center struck the Temp oil depot in the city of Rybinsk, in Russia’s northwestern Yaroslavl region, according to Ukrainian officials. The facility is part of Rosrezerv, Russia’s state material reserves system, and is designed to store large volumes of fuel. Footage released by Ukraine’s SBU counter-intelligence service showed a large fire engulfing the depot following the strike. Rybinsk is a major transit and logistics hub, and Temp plays a key role in storing and distributing oil products in northwestern Russia. “The SBU continues to cut off the supply chains of Russian oil products with surgical precision, both abroad and for the troops attacking Ukraine,” an SBU official told POLITICO. “This systematic work will continue in 2026.”