December 20, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier urged Chinese President Xi Jinping in a phone call on Tuesday to use his influence on Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war against Ukraine, according to a German government news release. 

Steinmeier also thanked President Xi "for the clear rejection of nuclear threats by Russia."

During the one-hour conversation, the German president reiterated Germany's determination to continue supporting Ukraine. He said Europe would not back down from Russian threats and had taken precautions against the energy crisis. 

Ukraine's defensibility and Europe's cohesion had been strengthened by Russian aggression, Steinmeier added, telling the Chinese president that "Putin had fundamentally miscalculated."

Latest development: China and Russia will begin a weeklong joint live-fire naval exercise in the East China Sea on Wednesday, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement, as the two partners step up cooperation in an increasingly tense western Pacific.

Russia will continue training Belarusian Air Force pilots to fly combat jets that have been refurbished to carry a "special warhead," Russian President Vladimir Putin said Monday during a joint news conference with his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko in Minsk. 

"I think it would be possible to continue implementing the proposal made by the Belarusian President to train crews for Belarusian combat planes, which have already been retooled to potentially use air-based munitions with a special warhead," Putin said. 

According to Putin, "such coordinated measures are exceptionally important due to the tense situation on the external border of the Union state."

“Taking into account the situation evolving along the border perimeter, I discussed with the [Russian] President some important details of cooperation in the sphere of military security," Lukashenko said during the same news conference.  

During the presser, Lukashenko also said: "Today we've put the S-400 [air defense missile] complex that you transferred to Belarus into a state of combat-readiness, as well as, most importantly, the Iskander complex, which you [Putin] have also handed over to us after promising it half a year ago." 

Lukashenko offered earlier this year to take symmetrical military measures in response to Western actions, asking Russia to help upgrade Belarusian military planes to make them capable of carrying nuclear warheads, according to the Russian state news agency TASS. 

Lukashenko had said in August that "everything is ready," according to TASS. 

Snake Island has a special place in Ukraine’s folklore, now more than ever. Its defiant defense – when a Russian warship was famously told to “go f*** yourself” – and then reconquest rallied a nation in the early months of the conflict with Russia, puncturing the myth of the invaders’ superiority.

Now, whipped by winter winds, it remains firmly in Ukrainian hands – a speck of rock that has both symbolic and strategic significance.

A few acres of rock and grass, treeless and difficult to access, Snake Island, also known as Zmiinyi Island, lies around 30 miles (48 kilometers) off the Ukrainian coast, near its maritime border with Romania.

Getting there proved challenging: An hour being pitched from wave to wave in a small boat, showered with spray, in sub-freezing temperatures. The Black Sea can be unforgiving, and so can its hazardous coastline. On the way back our dirigible boat got stuck on a sandbar, and it took six hours before we were transferred, one-by-one, to another vessel in the darkness.

Snake Island is now a desolate place, strewn with wreckage, its few buildings reduced to shells, its half-sunken jetty battered by the tide. It’s a graveyard of expensive military hardware – and is littered with unexploded ordnance and mines. This is not a place to be careless.

The CNN team saw at least four different kinds of landmines, Russian Pantsir surface-to-air missile systems, and an almost intact Tor anti-air missile complex. There was also the carcass of a Russian military helicopter that was hit.

Read more here.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has presented awards to troops on the frontline in eastern Ukraine, while Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin has admitted that the situation in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine is "extremely complicated."

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The United States is planning to send Ukraine electronic equipment that can convert unguided aerial munitions into “smart bombs," which offer a high degree of precision targeting, according to multiple US officials. 

The decision to ship the kits to Ukraine, first reported by the Washington Post, is expected to come in the next Ukraine security aid package as soon as this week, the sources said.

The guidance tail kits combine navigational and global positioning systems, and can be connected to bombs of different weights and sizes, to create what the Pentagon calls a Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM. The US military has used the technology on 500-pound bombs to larger 2,000-pound bombs to strike with a high degree of accuracy.

Officials did not say how many such kits or what specific type of JDAM would be provided. 

The precision bombs could help Ukraine attack fixed Russian defensive lines or other large targets. But they are normally dropped from aerial bombers or fighter jets. The Ukrainian Air Force would need to find a way to target and launch JDAMs from their ageing Soviet-era aircraft, much as they did with US-made HARM anti-radiation missiles earlier this year.

The kits give unguided bombs a range of approximately 15 miles, according to the US Air Force, meaning they would not allow Ukraine to strike deep into Russian territory.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has presented state awards to the Kremlin-installed governors of four occupied territories in southern and eastern Ukraine, which were illegally annexed by Moscow in September.

Denis Pushilin, head of the Donetsk People's Republic; Leonid Pasechnik, head of the Luhansk People's Republic; Yevgeny Balitsky, head of the Zaporizhzhia region; and Vladimir Saldo, head of the Kherson region, were granted the Russian Federation's highest state award at a ceremony in the Kremlin. 

Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of the state run new network RT (formerly Russia Today), also received an award from Putin.

“Thank you for wasting the cannibals," she said to Putin during her acceptance speech.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has visited the frontline city of Bakhmut, in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, where Ukrainian and Russian forces have been locked in brutal battle for months.

Zelensky met with soldiers and handed out awards, according to his office. Video posted by state TV shows the president clad in fatigues and a flak vest presenting awards to troops.

Bakhmut has seen some of the most ferocious fighting in the whole of the country since Russian forces launched their siege on the city in earnest in May, turning it into ruins.

On December 11, the Ukrainian military said the city was "holding on,” while fighting rages around it.

One man has been injured in shelling in the Shebekino district of Belgorod, a southern region of Russia bordering Ukraine, according to regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov.

"According to preliminary reports, there is one injured - a man with fractures to the forearm bones," Gladkov wrote on the messaging app Telegram.

Shebekino is south of the city of Belgorod, 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) from the Ukrainian border.

The electricity supply has been “disrupted” and a third of the town's residents are without power, said Gladkov.

Russia's war in Ukraine will not come to an end anytime soon, according to the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who said on Monday he was not hopeful about the prospect of peace as the war looks set to grind into the new year.

This is why the UN is focusing its efforts on areas where movement is possible, such as the exchange of prisoners of war and the Black Sea grain deal, added Guterres.

The UN played a key role in brokering the agreement that guarantees safe passage for ships carrying vital grain exports from Ukraine, but Guterres struck a pessimistic tone on the future of the conflict.

“We have no illusions that a true peace negotiation would be possible in the immediate future,” he said.