Russia Ukraine war latest: Kyiv targets missile fuel factory as Moscow claims assassination attempts foiled

China’s president Xi Jinping will visit Russia in 2025, Russia’s state-run RIA news agency quoted Moscow’s ambassador to Beijing as saying early on Friday.

“As for concrete bilateral events, I can say that the appropriate plans are actively being drawn up,” ambassador Igor Morgulov told RIA.

“What can be said that is no secret, in terms of priority, is that the chairman of the People’s Republic of China is expected in Russia next year.”

China hasn’t confirmed the visit yet.

Mr Putin visited China in February 2022, proclaiming a “no limits” partnership days before he sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine. He was in Beijing again last May, after his re-election by a landslide, welcoming a “new era” of relations focusing on opposition to US policy.

The Kremlin has sought to dismiss reports that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s wife is seeking a divorce, after the couple were forced to flee to Russia.

Ukraine’s postage stamps have become symbols of resistance and resilience during the war, using bold and sometimes provocative designs to boost morale and fund essential causes, the BBC reported.

Notable examples include a stamp featuring a soldier flipping off a Russian warship, which became iconic after the ship’s sinking, and others depicting a Ukrainian tractor towing a Russian tank or the mine-sniffing dog Patron.

Oscar Young from the UK-based stamp dealers and auctioneers Stanley Gibbons describes Ukraine’s war-focused approach to stamp design as highly unconventional.

“Generally stamps are artistic and polite, but to go out your way and be quite rude, placing profanity and being very gesturous on stamps – that is quite unique to these particular issues,” he told the BBC.

Half a million were left without heating and one person was killed as Russia launched more than 70 missiles at Kharkiv.

Yet 2025 will almost certainly be the year when the war ends – and it will not be the unmitigated disaster for Ukraine that seemed likely even a few months ago.

Russia’s “bloody and brutal war machine” has shown no respite “even at Christmas”, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said, as he condemned strikes against Ukraine’s energy grid.

Moscow has launched a massive missile barrage on Christmas Day, with the aim of crippling energy infrastructure sites across Ukraine.

More than 70 missiles, including ballistic missiles and more than 100 drones, were used in the attack, according to Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky.

Sir Keir condemned what he called an “ongoing assault on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure”.

He added: “I pay tribute to the resilience of the Ukrainian people, and the leadership of President Zelensky, in the face of further drone and missile attacks from (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s bloody and brutal war machine, with no respite, even at Christmas.”

He added: “As we go into the New Year, it remains vital that we redouble our resolve to place Ukraine in the strongest possible position to end Russia’s illegal aggression against the Ukrainian people.”

Russia has claimed it has foiled a number of plots to assassinate high-ranking officers and their families in Moscow.

The country’s Federal Security Service claimed the plot involved using bombs disguised as power banks or document folders, and added that four Russian citizens allegedly involved in planning the attack had been detained.

It comes weeks after Ukraine’s intelligence service killed a top Russian officer outside his apartment building in Moscow by detonating a bomb attached to an electric scooter.

An SBU source confirmed to Reuters that the Ukrainian intelligence agency had been behind the hit.

An Azerbaijan Airlines flight that crashed in Kazakhstan on Wednesday killing 38 people was downed by a Russian air defence system, four sources in Azerbaijan with knowledge of the investigation told Reuters.

One of the Azerbaijani sources familiar with the investigation into the crash told Reuters that preliminary results showed the plane was struck by a Russian Pantsir-S air defence system, and its communications were paralysed by electronic warfare systems on the approach into Grozny.

The source said: “No one claims that it was done on purpose. However, taking into account the established facts, Baku expects the Russian side to confess to the shooting down of the Azerbaijani aircraft.”

Russia’s foreign minister has said that Moscow is willing to work with Donald Trump when he becomes US president in January, but that he must make the first move.

Sergei Lavrov told reporters in Moscow on Thursday: “If the signals that are coming from the new team in Washington to restore the dialogue that Washington interrupted after the start of a special military operation (war in Ukraine), are serious, of course, we will respond to them,”

“But the Americans broke (off) the dialogue, so they should make the first move.”