Ukraine said at least 56 combat clashes with Russian forces took place on the first day of the year after a “record number” of drone and missile attacks struck Ukrainian cities over the past 24 hours, while Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to intensify attacks in the days ahead.
The Ukrainian military’s General Staff on January 1 said clashes took pace in the Donetsk region and near the long-fought-after towns of Bakhmut, Bohdanyivka, Klishchiyivka, and Andriyivka and that the Russian attacks had been repelled.
Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine
RFE/RL's Ukraine Live Briefing gives you the latest developments on Russia's invasion, Western military aid, the plight of civilians, and territorial control maps. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war, click here.
Ukrainian military authorities did not comment on casualties by the Russian side or their own.
In an interview with The Economist published on January 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy again blasted Russia as a "terrorist country" and said the Kremlin is showing no signs of seeking peace despite its continued losses on the battlefield.
Zelenskiy said any indication that Putin is seeking talks is just a reflection of the fact that he is running out of troops and armaments.
Zelenskiy said a major focus of Ukrainian counterattacks going forward would be to diminish Russian forces' strength in Crimea, even as his military defends under-pressure cities in the east, where civilians increasingly are becoming victims of Russian drone and missile attacks.
"I see only the steps of a terrorist country," he said in the interview.
In his New Year’s Eve video address, Zelenskiy thanked his country’s citizens for resisting the Russian invasion and called on them to live by the rule “either you work or you fight.”
“Because the world’s largest terrorist organization is against us,” he said. “And it is obvious how much more we should do, how more actively we should work, and how much stronger our unity and our struggle should be.”
Meanwhile, Putin, speaking at a military hospital in the Moscow region on January 1, called the December 30 shelling of the Russian city of Belgorod, which reportedly killed 25 people, a “terrorist attack” and vowed to intensify attacks against Ukraine.
"What happened in Belgorod is, of course, a terrorist act," Putin said. "They want to intimidate us and create uncertainty within the country. We're going to step up the punches."
Putin accused Ukraine of attacking civilian areas, while claiming that Moscow targets only military sites, despite Russian missile and drones routinely hitting residential and civilian areas in Ukraine.
Kyiv has not commented on the attack on Belgorod, although officials regularly state that Russia has used the region to launch assaults against Ukrainian sites.
Attacks from the air by both sides were reported on the first day of 2024 as the anniversary of Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion moves closer.
The Ukrainian Air Force wrote on Telegram that it had destroyed 87 of the Iranian-made Shahed drones fired at its cities overnight, adding that air defenses were working across the country.
The air force later said it had shot down nine of 10 additional Russia-launched drones "from the north" during New Year's Day and that two further Shahed drones near Kryviy Rih in the south.
Battlefield claims made by either side cannot immediately be verified because of the fighting in the regions.
Oleh Kiper, the Ukrainian head of the Odesa regional administration, said that one civilian was killed and nine were injured in a Russian attack on the Black Sea port city.
Ukraine’s military said the drone attack on Odesa targeted port infrastructure and that a fire had broken out at one port terminal.
“A large number of drones were directed from the sea toward the coastal zone,” the Southern Military Command said in a statement on Telegram.
The command also said Russia had three surface-to-air missile carriers on duty in the Black Sea armed with 24 Kalibr cruise missiles.
“The missile threat level is extremely high,” the statement said.
In the western city of Lviv, a drone strike destroyed a museum devoted to controversial World War II-era military commander Roman Shukhevych, who fought for Ukrainian independence from the Soviet Union and collaborated with Nazi Germany.
Although the building was destroyed, most of its holdings had been removed in the early days of the full-scale Russian invasion.
A drone strike also damaged a university in the Lviv region city of Dublyany, where there is a museum to Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera, who led an insurgent war against Soviet forces and also collaborated with the Nazis and who studied in Dublyany in the 1930s.
WATCH: Kharkiv, the second-largest city in Ukraine, woke up to Russian missile and drone strikes on December 31.
Your browser doesn’t support HTML5
Overnight Russian Strikes Hit Ukraine's Second City
In the northeastern Ukrainian city of Sumy, the regional administration said a Russian-launched Shahed drone hit a two-story residential building, killing one woman and trapping a number of other people under the rubble.
In the Russia-occupied city of Donetsk, Moscow-installed officials said four people were killed and 13 others injured in overnight shelling. A local official said one of the killed was a journalist with Russia’s state-run TASS news agency, although the person was not identified.