Here is the situation as it stands on Tuesday, January 10, 2023:
Fighting:
- A Russian missile hit a village market in Shevchenkove, Kharkiv, killing two people and wounding four, including a 10-year-old girl.
- Kremlin said it is confident about the defence ministry’s statement that 600 Ukrainian soldiers had been “destroyed” in an attack on Kramatorsk.
- Ukrainian forces say they are repelling constant Russian attacks on Bakhmut and other towns in the eastern region of Donbas.
- Al Jazeera’s Charles Stratford, reporting from Kyiv, said there is heavy fighting around Bakhmut, specifically a few kilometres north of Soledar, a salt-mining town heavily contested in recent months.
- Russian-backed separatist forces in the eastern Donetsk region said they have seized a village near Bakhmut that Moscow has been trying to capture for months.
Diplomacy:
- Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied that a senior Russian official was discussing a potential peace deal with European officials.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy denounced again what he called Russia’s failure to observe a truce it had proclaimed for Orthodox Christmas by staging attacks on Ukrainian cities.
- Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov expressed satisfaction over the development of the bilateral political dialogue and practical cooperation with China in a call with his newly appointed Chinese counterpart, Qin Gang.
- United States National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said Iran could contribute to war crimes in Ukraine by providing drones to Russia.
- The Kremlin said new deliveries of Western weapons to Kyiv would “deepen the suffering of the Ukrainian people” and would not change the course of the conflict.
- Russian and Ukrainian human rights commissioners will meet in Turkey later this week to likely discuss more prisoner exchanges.
Economy
- About 76 percent of foreign companies continue to operate in Russia, the head of Russia’s lower legislative chamber said.
- Ukraine’s Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said Kyiv expects the European Union to include Russian state nuclear energy company Rosatom in its next round of sanctions.
