Russia struck Ukraine with missiles and drones hours before the leaders of both countries used New Year’s Eve addresses to their people on Sunday to offer a unique message at the end of another year of brutal that war.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said the Russian invasion had already shown his country’s strength and resilience — and he called on Ukrainians to “make an extraordinary effort and do more.”
“Each of us fought, worked, waited, helped, lived and hoped for this year,” said Mr. Zelensky in a 20 minute video address delivered from his presidential office. “No matter how many missiles the enemy fires, no matter how many bullets and attacks,” he promised, “we will still rise.”
An audience at the New Year’s address given by his Russian counterpart, Vladimir V. Putin, could be forgiven for thinking that Europe’s largest land war since World War II would take place just over the border.
“I want to wish every Russian family all the best,” Mr. Putin said in a message it was just four minutes long, and delivered in a familiar setting for the Russian leader’s end-of-year speech, with the Kremlin night lit up in the background. “We are one nation, one big family.”
In a speech that appeared to be aimed at sending a reassuring signal of normalcy to the Russian people, Mr. Putin spoke briefly of Russian soldiers fighting on his behalf, calling them “our heroes” who are “in front line of battle. for truth and justice.” And he didn’t mention Ukraine or the West.
The familiar performance signaled a return to business as usual — and a marked departure from the New Year’s speech the Russian leader offered a year ago. That night, angry, defiant and embarrassed by a Russian retreat in northeastern Ukraine that triggered the Kremlin’s unpopular and chaotic military draft, Mr. Putin accused the West of “cynical use of Ukraine.”
His brief message on Sunday seemed to reflect his confidence in Russia’s ability to continue waging war without taking the lives of its citizens, given the failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive and the flagging of support for Ukraine in West.
Mr. Putin did not mention the tens of thousands of Russians who have died this year in bloody battles for Ukrainian cities such as Bakhmut and Avdiivka. And he only obliquely requested his narrative about Russia’s existential conflict with the West. “There is no force that can divide us, force us to forget the memory and faith of our fathers, or stop our progress,” he said.
A day earlier, Russia sustained what appeared to be its deadliest single strike on land since Mr. Putin’s forces began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The attack on the Russian city of Belgorod left of 24 people died, Russian officials said. , and injured more than 100 others.
Russian officials blamed Ukraine for the attack, and on Saturday night they retaliated with strikes in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, just 60 miles across the border from Belgorod. Residents there were battered by multiple air-raid sirens overnight, as several waves of ballistic missiles and attack drones rained down on the city center, injuring nearly 30 people and damaging private homes, a hospital and a hotel. , according to Ukrainian officials.
“These are not military facilities, but cafes, residential buildings and offices,” said the mayor of Kharkiv, Ihor Terekhov, in a social media post that included a video of firefighters trying to put out the fire amid a pile of rubble.
Air-raid alerts sounded in many cities and towns across Ukraine on Sunday night, as local authorities warned against incoming Russian missiles and attack drones. Early on Monday, Oleh Kiper, the governor of the southern region of Odesa, said on Telegram that at least one person was killed in a Russian drone attack in the city of Odesa.
In the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, “heavy shelling” from Ukraine killed four people and wounded at least 13, Denis Pushilin, the Russian-appointed head of the wider Donetsk region, said on Telegram early Monday morning.
The Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement Sunday that the attacks in Kharkiv “hit decision-making centers and military facilities,” insisting that the Kharkiv Palace Hotel, which was hit by a missile, was home to members of the armed forces and services of Ukrainian intelligence. The strike left a hole in several floors in the front.
The hotel is one of the most famous in Kharkiv, and foreign journalists often stayed there. The attack appears to be the latest in a series of Russian missile attacks on areas popular with journalists. This past summer, Russian missiles hit a prominent restaurant and a hotel in the eastern cities of Kramatorsk and Pokrovsk.
The weekend air assaults in Ukraine and Russia capped a week of intensified attacks by both sides on land, sea and air that signaled that neither Kyiv nor Moscow wanted to reduce the war. In recent days, Ukraine has shot down a Russian warship and said it shot down five fighter jets, while Russian forces have made small advances across the front line.
“Our enemies will surely see what our true anger is,” Mr. Zelensky said in his New Year’s Eve speech.
On Friday, Russia struck Ukraine with a massive and deadly air assault that breached air defenses and wreaked havoc in Kyiv, the capital. The attacks killed around 40 people, injured around 160 others and hit critical industrial and military infrastructure, as well as civilian buildings such as hospitals and schools.
The attack on Belgorod came the next day.
The Ukrainian government has not publicly commented on the strike, as is its usual policy when Russian territory is struck. But an official from Ukraine’s intelligence services, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the strike was in response to Russia’s attack on Friday, and that only military facilities were targeted.
Russia said on Saturday that the attack on Belgorod “will not go unpunished,” and it took only moments for Moscow to retaliate, targeting nearby Kharkiv, with what Ukrainian officials said appear to be short-range Iskander ballistic missiles. Kharkiv is so close to the Russian border that air-raid alarms often don’t have time to sound before the missiles hit.
Scenes of destruction emerged after the Russian attack. The lobby of the Kharkiv Palace Hotel is littered with debris from collapsed floors, a white piano and red armchairs covered in rubble. The tables set for dinner were blown away by the gentle breeze: the windows of the hotel restaurant were all blown away.
On a nearby street, firefighters and city workers were busy clearing the pavement of debris that had fallen from cracked facades. Shards of glass shattered under their feet.
Mr. Zelensky said Ukraine has experienced 6,000 air raid alerts this year. “Almost every night,” he said, the country “wakes up to sirens and descends into shelter to protect its children from enemy missiles and drones.”
And almost every night, he said, after they heard the “all clear” signal, Ukrainians went up and looked “to the sky” to “prove once again that Ukrainians are stronger than fear.”
Laura Boushnak contributed reporting from Kharkiv, and Vivek Shankar and Jin Yu Young from Seoul.
