Russian shelling kills four as Ukraine prepares for first December Christmas

Russian shelling in southern Ukraine’s Kherson region killed four people on Sunday.

Among those killed were an 87-year-old man and his 81-year-old wife who died following a strike on their apartment building.

Oleksandr Prokudin, the head of the regional military administration, said that the barrage injured nine other people, including a 15-year-old, sparked fires in homes and at a private medical facility and set a local gas pipeline alight.

Andrii Yermak, the head of the Ukrainian president’s office, wrote: “There are no holidays for the enemy.

“They do not exist for us as long as the enemy kills our people and remains on our land.”

The shelling across Kherson reached the centre of the region’s capital city of the same name.

The assault took place as Ukraine prepared to officially celebrate Christmas for the first time on December 25, having previously marked the date on January 7.

The Russian Orthodox Church observes the birth of Jesus on January 7.

Some Orthodox Ukrainians observed Christmas on December 25 last year in response to Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

The cathedral in the Monastery of the Caves, a Unesco World Heritage Site in Kyiv, held its Christmas celebration on January 7 of this year, but the service was held in the Ukrainian language for the first time in the 31 years of Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union.

President Volodymyr Zelensky signed legislation in July moving the public Christmas Day holiday to December 25.

However, one of Ukraine’s two competing Orthodox church organisations is sticking with the January date dictated by the Julian calendar.

To mark Christmas Eve on December 24, Mr Zelensky addressed the nation in a video filmed before the floodlit St Sophia Cathedral in central Kyiv.

He reassured Ukrainians fighting against Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country that “step by step, day by day, the darkness is losing”.

“Today, this is our common goal, our common dream. And this is precisely what our common prayer is for today. For our freedom. For our victory. For our Ukraine,” Mr Zelensky said.

Kherson was not the only region of Ukraine to come under attack Sunday.

Russian forces launched 15 drone strikes overnight.

The Ukrainian Air Force reported that 14 of the Iranian-made Shahed drones were destroyed over the Mykolaiv, Kirovohrad, Zaporizhzhya, Dnipropetrovsk and Khmelnytskyi regions.

Meanwhile, Governor Oleh Syniehubov said that two people were wounded during the Russian shelling of 20 towns and villages across northern Ukraine’s Kharkiv region.

In Russia, a man was injured in the Bryansk region after a village close to the Ukrainian border came under fire, the region’s governor, Alexander Bogomaz, said.