On the 29th of December Russia fired swarms of drones and missiles against Ukrainian weapon factories and depots.
Ukraine responded on new year's eve with a missile attack against the Russian city of Belgorod. The attack led to a number of civilian casualties.
Russia responded with attacks on Kharkiv where a hotel frequently used by western personnel was destroyed.
On new year's eve Ukraine also fired missiles into the center of Donetzk city. Russia launched dozens of drones towards Odessa. In both cities several people were killed and wounded.
President Putin of Russia began the year with a visit to a military hospital (in Russian, machine translation):
On January 1 of the new year, Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived at the Central Military Clinical Hospital named after A. A. Vishnevsky. Not just like that, but with an inspection and a conversation with military personnel wounded during a special military operation. A frank conversation, with uncomfortable questions.
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Putin, in response to a question from another military officer, also commented on the massive enemy strike on Belgorod on December 30. He did not hold back his emotions and directly called the incident a terrorist act.Targeted attack on the civilian population. Of course, this is a terrorist attack. Should we respond like this? Of course we can. We can hit the squares in Kiev and any other city. Denis, there are children walking there, mummies with strollers. I understand… I'm seething myself. I want to ask you something. Do we need to do this?
In response, the military explained that he does not talk about strikes on civilians. He believes that it is necessary to hit the military, infrastructure: "We need a strike to once and for all, so that they can not come to their senses and respond to us already."
And that's what we do. You noticed that just the next day such strikes were delivered. And today, in my opinion, they are applied. And tomorrow they will be,
– Putin promised.
The President reminded that we use high-precision weapons to hit places where the enemy makes decisions, places where military personnel, mercenaries gather, and other similar centers.
First of all, for military facilities. And they are quite sensitive, these blows. So we will do it. You probably noticed that just the next day such strikes were delivered. And today, in my opinion, they are applied. And tomorrow we will do it. You know what the point of what they do is: they want to: a) intimidate us and b) create some kind of uncertainty in our country. But we, for our part, will step up the strikes I mentioned. Definitely. No such crime – and it is certainly a crime – against the civilian population will go unpunished. This is 100%. There can be no doubt about it.
Patrick Armstrong reminds everyone to listen to what Putin says.
This morning a total of four waves with probably hundreds of drones and missiles hit Kiev and other Ukrainian cities.
First came geranium suicide drones to exhaust Ukrainian air defenses. Then followed cruise and ballistic missile strikes (machine translation):
The current attack, apparently, was a complex one – first "Shahids" and cruise missiles from strategic bombers tried to calculate the air defense positions, and then the strike was followed by faster and more accurate "Daggers". It is possible that again, as in May last year, the Russians "hunted" air defense systems in this way.
But, again, there is no official data on which objects were used for arrivals. Zaluzhny said that civilian and critical infrastructure, industrial and military facilities were attacked.
Russian military publications say that the strikes were aimed at ammunition depots and drones. But so far there is no confirmation of this.
At the same time, judging by the videos published in social networks, the damage to warehouses in Kiev is serious. According to Klitschko, 2,000 square meters of warehouses were engulfed in fire in the morning.
Debris from air defenses killed and wounded a number of people.
The Ukrainians claimed that they intercepted most of the incoming weapons:
Ukraine Battle Map @ukraine_map – 9:56 UTC · Jan 2, 2024
Full Breakdown of missiles and drones shot down by Ukraine 🇺🇦 on January 2nd
10/10 or (100%) of Kinzhal Missiles
59/70 or (84.3%) of X-101 Missiles
3/3 or (100%) of Kalibr Missiles
0/12 or (0%) of Ballistic Missiles
0/4 or (0%) of Kh-31P Missiles
35/35 or (100%) of Shahed Drones
Reality disagrees with those claims. Video from the ground showed Kinzhal impacts.
As Strana remarked yesterday (machine translation):
The sharply increased air attacks in recent days have shown that the Ukrainian air defense system does not intercept all missiles and drones-despite the sharp increase in its capabilities over the past year. In the West, they make gloomy forecasts about this.
The British newspaper The Telegraph, citing experts, writes that the Ukrainian air defense system will not be able to repel all winter attacks by Russia. The APU will have to choose the objects that need to be protected.
The reason is that the supply of Western air defense systems and missiles to them will not be enough.
"There will be some systems for which they will have to ration their ammunition even more than now. They may just have to avoid hitting some targets because they don't have enough interceptor missiles," said military analyst Jimmy Rushton.
Of particular concern are the deliveries of Patriot interceptor missiles, which are running out due to delays in American military assistance, the newspaper writes.
The Russian Ministry of Defense reported:
The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation delivered a group strike with high-precision long-range weapons and unmanned aerial vehicles on enterprises of the military-industrial complex of Ukraine that carried out orders for the production of missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles, and repair of weapons and military hardware in Kiev and its suburbs, as well as storage sites for missiles, ammunition, and aircraft weapons supplied to the Kiev regime by Western countries. The purpose of the strike has been achieved. All the targets have been engaged.
We can expect that these missile attacks will further intensify.
Jaquese Baud, in an excerpt from his new book published by Postil, points to Russia's inherent advantage:
The reason the Russians are better than the West in Ukraine is that they see the conflict as a process; whereas we see it as a series of separate actions. The Russians see events as a film. We see them as photographs. They see the forest, while we focus on the trees. That is why we place the start of the conflict on February 24, 2022, or the start of the Palestinian conflict on October 7, 2023. We ignore the contexts that bother us and wage conflicts we do not understand. That is why we lose our wars …
Disarming and denazifying Ukraine, the war aims Putin had named, indeed describe a long process, not just the visible events of this or that single day.