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A Ukrainian drone strike killed 24 people and injured at least 50 more as they celebrated the new year in a Russian-occupied village in Ukraine’s Kherson region, Russian officials said, as tensions between the two countries continue to rise despite diplomats hailing productive peace talks.
Three drones struck a cafe and hotel in the resort town of Khorly on the Black Sea coast, the region’s Moscow-installed leader, Vladimir Saldo, said in a statement on Telegram on Thursday. He said one of the drones was carrying an incendiary mixture that sparked a blaze.
Ukrainian officials did not immediately comment on the claim and the Associated Press was unable to independently verify the incident.
A number of Russian officials condemned the attack. The chair of the upper house of parliament, Valentina Matviyenko, said it strengthened Russia’s resolve to quickly achieve its goals in its almost four-year invasion of Ukraine.
The strike “once again demonstrates the validity of our initial demands,” Matviyenko said.
The statement follows claims from Moscow that Ukraine had launched a long-range drone attack against one of Vladimir Putin’s official residences in north-western Russia on Tuesday. Kyiv said the claims were a lie.
Russia’s defence ministry said on Thursday that its specialists had accessed the navigation system in one of the drones it claimed was used in the attack, and that data extracted confirmed that Putin’s residence was the target. The ministry did not share evidence of its findings, but officials said it would transfer the data to US officials “through established channels”.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that the CIA had determined that no attempted attack had taken place. Donald Trump had initially said he was “very angry” about the purported attack, but he later posted a link on social media to a New York Post editorial describing the Russian claims as “bluster”.
Russia’s defence ministry also released a video of a downed drone it said was involved in the attack.
The night-time clip shows a man in camouflage gear, a helmet and a Kevlar vest standing near a damaged drone lying in snow. The man, his face covered, talks about the drone. Neither the man nor the defence ministrty provided any location or date, and neither the video nor its claims could be independently verified.
Kyiv has called the allegations of an attack on Putin’s residence a ruse to derail ongoing peace negotiations, which have gathered pace in recent weeks on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said in his new year address that a peace deal was “90% ready” but that the remaining 10%, believed to include key sticking points such as territory, would “determine the fate of peace, the fate of Ukraine and Europe, how people will live”.
Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, said on Wednesday that he, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, had a “productive call” with the national security advisers of Britain, France, Germany and Ukraine “to discuss advancing the next steps in the European peace process”.
“We focused on how to move the discussions forward in a practical way on behalf of [the] peace process, including strengthening security guarantees and developing effective deconfliction mechanisms to help end the war and ensure it does not restart,” he wrote on X.
Ukraine’s lead negotiator, Rustem Umerov, reaffirmed that European and Ukrainian officials planned to meet on Saturday, and Zelenskyy is expected to hold talks with European leaders next week.
With reporting by the Associated Press
