Russia-Ukraine war – latest: At least 20 injured as Kremlin launches sweeping missile and drone attack

A top Nato military official has called on public and private actors in the West to change their mindsets from a focus on efficiency to a focus on effectiveness to live up to an era in which anything can happen at any time – hours after he spoke with Ukraine’s top soldier.

“We need a warfighting transformation of NATO,” the chief of the alliance’s Military Committee, Dutch Admiral Rob Bauer, said as he addressed a meeting of national defence chiefs in Brussels.

In the past, public and private actors had lived in an era in which everything was plentiful, foreseeable, controllable, and focused on efficiency, he noted.

Now they would have to change their mindsets to “an era in which anything can happen at any time, an era in which we need to expect the unexpected, an era in which we need to focus on effectiveness in order to be fully effective”.

His comments came hours after he held a phonecall with the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s military, General Valery Zaluzhny. The pair will both be present for a Ukraine-Nato council later today, though Gen Zaluzhny will be present via videocall.

A statement from Gen Zaluzhny’s office said he “exchanged views on the tactics and strategy of Ukraine and the Alliance” and “emphasised that in a war of such intensity, technologies play an important role”.

Two Russian missiles have struck a residential area in the centre of Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, injuring 17 people, two of them seriously, and badly damaging homes, local officials have said.

Rescue teams were sifting through piles of rubble to establish whether others were hurt. The city’s mayor described two “powerful explosions” and said at least 10 dwellings had been damaged.

Ukraine’s Emergency Services said one of the missiles had hit a three-storey building that had previously housed a medical centre. Fires were extinguished in two buildings and residential and other buildings sustained damage. Regional Police Chief Volodymyr Tymoshko told public broadcaster Suspilne that one of the missiles had hit a roadway.

Emergency services posted online photos showing rescue teams poring over piles of smashed building materials, tackling fires, scrambling up ladders to damaged upper storeys and helping evacuees board minibuses.

Kharkiv Regional Governor Oleh Synehubov, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said 17 people had been injured. Fourteen were in hospital, including two women who were seriously hurt.

Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov, also writing on Telegram, said the missiles struck “precisely where there is no military infrastructure and precisely where there are in fact residences.”

“There are at least 10 damaged buildings. Rescue teams are continuing to go through the rubble. And there is plenty of rubble.”

Kharkiv, in Ukraine’s northeast, has been a frequent target of attacks, but in the space of the nearly two-year-old conflict, the city has not fallen into Russian hands. Russian missiles hit a hotel in the city last week, injuring 11 people.

At least three civilians have been injured after Russia fired nearly two dozen Iranian-made drones in southern Ukraine.

Ukraine’s air force said they successfully intercepted 19 out of the 20 Iranian-made Shahed drones fired by the Kremlin across Ukraine during this latest overnight long-range assault – but the main thrust of the attack appears to have been the port city of Odessa in the south.

The Ukrainian military said Russian targeted Odessa and other southern regions for at least three hours while the southern military command specified that Russia had fired at least 11 drones at Odessa.

Oleh Kiper, governor of Odessa Oblast, said three people, including two women and one 62-year-old man, had been injured by strikes on the region’s namesake city after drone debris caused a fire.

The intercepted drones hit residential buildings, and damaged a gas pipe and a dozen cars in one of the port’s districts, the Interior Ministry said. About 130 were evacuated, it added.

Moscow has repeatedly tried to hit infrastructure in Ukraine’s southern Black Sea ports since it pulled out of a United Nations-brokered deal that allowed safe passage of Ukrainian grain shipments via the sea.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre confirmed the meeting during a press conference on Tuesday.

“As it relates to the meeting that the President is having tomorrow here at the White House with congressional ranking members and leaders to talk about the very important supplemental requests that this President made a couple months ago at this point,” she told reporters.

A lawyer for imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny said Tuesday that Russian authorities charged her in absentia with participating in an extremist group.

The same charges were brought against three other lawyers who represented Navalny and were jailed in October in a move his allies had decried as designed to put additional pressure on the politician.

Olga Mikhailova, who defended Navalny for over a decade and has left Russia, revealed on social media that the charges were brought against her.

“For 16 years, you defend a person” who was accused of embezzlement, fraud, defamation and “and recently (became) an ‘extremist,’ so it means you yourself are an extremist,” she wrote in a Facebook post, rejecting the charges against her.

French President Emmanuel Macron said on Tuesday he would travel to Ukraine in February to finalise a bilateral security guarantee deal and Paris would deliver more sophisticated weaponry in the coming weeks.

He said Russia could not be allowed to defeat Ukraine otherwise the security of Europe would be put at risk.

Macron made the announcement at a wide-ranging news conference Tuesday evening.

He said he will travel to Ukraine next month and that a Russian victory in Ukraine would undermine the international order.

Dmytro Kuleba made the remarks in an hour-long informal interview with a Ukrainian video blogger published on Monday.

“The most difficult talks are those in which you feel simply that you want to go and punch your opposite number in the nose, but you really can’t do that,” the minister said.

More than 60 heads of state and government and hundreds of business leaders are gathering in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss the biggest global challenges during the annual event.

Mr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, will aim to keep his country’s long and largely stalemated defence against Russia on the minds of political leaders, as Israel’s war with Hamas has garnered much of the world’s attention.

President Zelensky met with Polish president Andrzej Duda on Tuesday. He hinted that the meeting had been productive as the pair “coordinated” their positions ahead of the Nato summit in Washington.

“I met with @AndrzejDuda to discuss our bilateral relations, including our cooperation on Ukraine’s path to EU membership.

“We discussed the battlefield situation and further defense assistance for Ukraine. We also coordinated our positions ahead of the NATO summit in Washington.”