Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,033

Here is the situation on Monday, December 23:

Fighting:

More than 1,000 North Korean soldiers have been killed or wounded in Russia’s war with Ukraine, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said on Monday.
Russia’s Ministry of Defence said its air defence systems destroyed 42 Ukrainian drones over five Russian regions overnight on Sunday.
Russian forces have captured two villages in Ukraine, one in the Kharkiv region in the northeast and one in the eastern Donetsk region, the Russian Defence Ministry said on Sunday.
Ukraine military’s general said Sontsivka, a village in the east, was in a sector subject to 26 Russian attacks in the past 24 hours. The general staff also reported heavy fighting near Pokrovsk, with 34 Russian attempts to pierce defences.
Ukraine’s Parliamentary Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets said Russian forces executed five unarmed Ukrainian prisoners of war on Sunday.
Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) named Colonel General Alexei Kim, a deputy chief of Russia’s General Staff as one of the people it suspects of ordering a missile strike on a hotel in eastern Ukraine in August. The SBU said he acted “with the motive of deliberately killing employees of” the Reuters news agency.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has pledged retaliation after Ukrainian drones struck residential buildings in the city of Kazan in Russia’s Tatarstan region.
Putin met Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico in the Kremlin on Sunday, a rare visit by a European Union leader to Moscow as a contract allowing Russian gas to transit through Ukraine nears expiry.
South Korea says North Korea is preparing to deploy additional troops and weapons to aid Russia in its full-scale war against Ukraine, Yonhap news agency reported.
US President-elect Donald Trump said on Sunday that Russian President Vladimir Putin has expressed a desire to meet him “as soon as possible” to discuss the war in Ukraine.