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Damaged hotel in Kyiv (on December 31)
Photo: - / dpa
What has happened in the past few hours
Russia has shelled the Ukrainian capital Kyiv for the second night in a row.
Shortly before midnight, another air alert was sounded for Kyiv and most of eastern Ukraine.
The governor of the Kyiv region, Oleksiy Kuleba, told Telegram that the enemy was specifically targeting critical infrastructure in its drone attacks.
He explicitly mentioned that the drones were Iranian-made.
A 19-year-old man was taken to a hospital in the Desnianskiy district of Kiev after drone debris hit a building.
This was announced by Mayor Vitali Klitschko on Telegram on Monday.
An advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also spoke of drone debris hitting a street in the most populous district of Desnianskyi in northeastern Kiev and damaging a building next to it.
Ukraine's military command in the east of the country said that air defense systems destroyed nine Iranian Shahed drones over the Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporizhia regions in the early hours of Monday.
That says Kyiv
The army leadership also declared that "the Russian occupiers" had "fired 16 times with multiple rocket launchers."
These attacks were aimed in particular at the children's hospital in the southern Ukrainian city of Cherson.
President Zelenskyi strongly condemned the recent Russian drone strikes on his country's cities on New Year's Eve.
"The Russian terrorists were already pathetic and started the new year the same way," said Zelenskyj in his daily video address on Sunday.
These attacks could not harm the Ukrainians.
»Our sense of togetherness, our authenticity, life itself - all of this is so much in contrast to the fear that prevails in Russia.«
According to Selenskyj, the Russian military is clearly afraid.
"And they are right to be afraid, because they will lose." Even with drones and rockets, the Russian military would not get very far.
"Because we stick together." The Russian side, on the other hand, is only held together by fear, he argued.
The Russian military launched a wave of so-called kamikaze drones towards Ukrainian cities on New Year's Eve.
According to information from Kyiv, the Iranian-made Shahed drones, which were aimed at the capital Kyiv and the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, among other things, were shot down by the Ukrainian air defense before they reached their targets.
A total of 45 drones were destroyed, said Zelenskyj.
For weeks, Russia has been targeting the Ukrainian energy grid with cruise missiles, rockets and drones.
The severe damage caused so far has led to massive failures in the water and electricity supply.
With this tactic, Russia wants to put pressure on the civilian population of Ukraine in winter.
Moscow says so
According to Russian sources, earlier on New Year's Eve Ukraine shelled the town of Makivka and other locations in Moscow-controlled parts of the Donetsk region.
A military headquarters was reportedly hit, killing several people.
At least 25 rockets were fired at the region, the Moscow-appointed administration said in the Donetsk region.
The Russian state news agency TASS quoted the administration as saying that at least 15 people were injured in a series of shelling with Himars rockets (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) in the city of Makivka.
Daniil Bezsonov, information minister of the self-proclaimed "Donetsk People's Republic," said there was an attack on a vocational school that served as quarters for military personnel.
The attack happened two minutes after midnight on New Year's Day.
International reactions
According to estimates by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the interest of Russian secret services in Germany continues to increase the longer the war in Ukraine lasts.
"Russia's interest in enlightenment here in Germany is not only unbroken, but is also increasing the further the effects of the war continue," Thomas Haldenwang, President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, told the dpa news agency.
"The current case also shows how real the danger of Russian espionage is," said Haldenwang, referring to the alleged double agent arrested shortly before Christmas at the Federal Intelligence Service (BND).
In order not to jeopardize the investigation, he, like BND boss Bruno Kahl, does not want to comment on the details.
The arrested man is suspected of having given secret information to a Russian intelligence service.
Haldenwang said he expects that Moscow will try to compensate for the reconnaissance opportunities lost by the expulsion of 40 agents: either with more "traveling agents" or with other covers.
According to the authorities, such a camouflage was used, for example, by a suspected Russian spy who has been in custody in Norway since October.
He had posed as a Brazilian researcher.
In response to the start of Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine on February 24, European states expelled Russian agents.
At the beginning of April, the federal government declared 40 members of the Russian embassy in Berlin to be undesirable persons.
jok/dpa/Reuters
