Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,394

Here is where things stand on Friday, December 19:

Fighting

• Three people, including two crew members of a cargo vessel, were killed in overnight Ukrainian drone attacks on the Russian port of Rostov-on-Don and the town of Bataysk in the country’s southern Rostov region, local governor Yury Slyusar said.
• Russian strikes near Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odesa killed a woman in her car and hit infrastructure. Odesa’s Governor Oleh Kiper said a Russian drone killed a woman crossing a bridge in her car, and three children were injured in the incident.
• Kiper also asked residents whose homes have been affected by extended power outages to be patient and to end blocking roads in protest against the blackouts.
• “As a result of enemy attacks, the energy infrastructure in Odesa region has suffered extensive damage,” Kiper said.
• About 180,000 consumers have been left without electricity across five Ukrainian regions after Russian attacks, Ukraine’s acting energy minister, Artem Nekrasov, said.
• Nekrasov said the southern regions of Mykolaiv and Zaporizhia, the central regions of Cherkasy and Dnipropetrovsk, and the northeastern region of Sumy have been impacted.
• Russia has formed a military brigade equipped with Moscow’s new hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missile, Russian chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov, said.
• Russia fired the Oreshnik at Ukraine for the first time in November 2024, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has boasted that the missile is impossible to intercept and has destructive power comparable to that of a nuclear weapon.

Sanctions

• European Union leaders have agreed to provide an interest-free loan to Ukraine to meet its military and economic needs for the next two years, EU Council President Antonio Costa has said.
• EU leaders avoided “chaos and division” with their decision to provide Ukraine with a loan through borrowing cash rather than use frozen Russian assets, Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever said. “We remained united,” De Wever added after EU leaders discussed for hours how to provide Ukraine with the money it needs to sustain its fight.
• Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk had earlier said the EU leaders had agreed in principle at a summit in Brussels to work on financing Ukraine in 2026 and 2027 through the use of frozen Russian assets rather than EU borrowing. But attempts to overcome differences over the plan, including talks to reassure Belgium and other concerned countries that Europe would share the legal and financial risks, failed to seal the deal.
• The new draft had offered Belgium and other countries unlimited guarantees for damages should Moscow successfully sue them for using Russian assets to finance Ukraine. The deal also offered EU countries and institutions, whose assets may be seized by Russia in retaliation, the possibility to offset such damages against Russian assets held by the EU.
• Earlier, Russia’s central bank said it would extend legal action beyond its lawsuit against Belgium-based depository Euroclear and sue European banks in a