Here’s what happened on Wednesday, December 3:
fighting
- Russian forces attacked Ukraine’s Kherson region using “rocket launchers, mortars and drones”, killing a 76-year-old woman and wounding at least two other people, the Kherson regional prosecutor’s office said in a post on Telegram.
- One person was killed and five were injured in a Russian drone strike in the city of Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine, Oleksandr Honcharenko, head of the city’s military administration, wrote on Facebook.
- Rescuers recovered the body of a man on Tuesday who was killed in a Russian attack on a nine-storey residential building in Kramatorsk in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, the State Emergency Service (SES) said.
- A woman injured in Russia’s Nov. 19 attack on Ternopil, Ukraine, has died, bringing the death toll from the bombing to 36, said Serhiy Ziubnenko, head of Ternopil regional police.
- Four adults and a child are still missing after the attack on Ternopil, and forensic scientists and investigators are still examining the site, Ziubnenko said in a post on Facebook.
- In the front-line Zaporizhia region, Governor Ivan Fedorov said a Russian drone strike left 5,000 people without electricity.
- Russia’s Defense Ministry has once again released video footage claiming that its forces have captured Pokrovsk, a major city in eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian army says it still controls the northern part of the city and fighting is ongoing.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin challenged foreign and Ukrainian journalists to visit Pokrovsk in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine, as well as Kupyansk, “to objectively inform their listeners and readers about what is happening in the world, including in Ukraine”.
regional security
- The Russian-flagged MIDVOLGA-2 oil tanker has arrived in northern Turkey after it was reported hit by a drone attack in the Black Sea. Russia has blamed Ukraine for the attack, a charge Kiev denies.
US-Russia talks
- Putin held a five-hour meeting in the Kremlin on Tuesday with United States special envoy Steve Witkoff and US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
- Putin ally Yuri Ushakov played down hopes of a quick breakthrough in talks aimed at ending Russia’s war on Ukraine, saying the meeting was “constructive” but no agreement was reached, according to Russia’s TASS news agency.
- Putin earlier accused European countries of deliberately sabotaging efforts to reach a peace deal by including proposals that are “absolutely unacceptable” to Russia. “They are in favor of war,” Putin said.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Putin was toying with the Trump administration in hopes that it would lose interest in resolving the conflict.
- Trump briefly mentioned the conversation during a Cabinet meeting in Washington DC. “Our people are in Russia right now to see if we can arrange this,” Trump said. “Not an easy situation. What a mess.”
economy
- After meeting with Irish President Catherine Connolly in Dublin, Zelensky said he was keen for Irish companies to invest in his country.
- Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said India’s imports of Russian oil could decline for “a short time” as Moscow plans to increase supplies using “sophisticated” technology to mitigate the impact of Western sanctions.
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