Zelenskiy Blasts Fico In Energy Feud As Fighting Intensifies On Battlefield

Peloni:  Ukraine continues to act with complete disregard to the intrinsic needs of its neighbors, even as these neighbors have been integral to Ukraine’s war with Russia.  Indeed, as the unforced error by Urkaine with Poland last year appears to have taught the haughty now dictator of Ukraine very little, it appears that Fico will have his turn at tutoring the Ukrainians on the cost of believing that their interests alone must dominate every topic, and this lesson will likely be a very cold one for Ukrainians to bear in the coming months.

By RFE/RL | Dec 28, 2024

Drone attacks and fighting intensified in Ukraine and Russia on December 28, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy accused Slovakia’s prime minister of taking “orders” from the Kremlin to harm Kyiv and his own people as an energy feud heightened as well.

“It appears that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin gave [Robert] Fico the orders to open the second energy front against Ukraine at the expense of the Slovak people’s interests,” Zelenskiy wrote on social media.

“Fico’s threats to cut off Ukraine’s emergency power supply this winter while Russia attacks our power plants and energy grid can only be explained by this.”

The comments came after Fico on December 27 threatened to halt supplies of electricity to Ukraine if Kyiv blocks transit of Russian gas to Slovakia.

Ukraine has announced it will not extend the transit contract of Russian state-owned company Gazprom after January 1 — ceasing deliveries of gas to several European nations — as the West looks to cut off the Kremlin’s source of funding for the war.

The transport deal was signed before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, and most European nations have since begun developing alternative sources of gas, although Fico says finding alternatives would be too costly for Slovakia.

Fico, along with Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, has angered the West by continuing to have close ties to Putin despite U.S. and EU sanctions. Fico visited Putin in Moscow earlier this week and has offered to host potential peace talks between Ukraine and Russia.

Zelenskiy said Slovakia accounts for nearly 20 percent of Ukraine’s power imports.

“Slovakia is part of the single European energy market and Fico must respect common European rules,” Zelenskiy wrote.

“Any arbitrary decisions in Bratislava or Moscow’s orders to Fico regarding electricity cannot cut Ukraine’s power supply, but they can certainly cut current Slovak authorities’ ties to the European community,” he added, suggesting the move would deprive Slovakia itself of some $200 million a year.

Meanwhile, as Russia’s full-scale invasion grinds on toward its fourth year, Ukraine and Russia exchanged accusations of drone attacks in several regions as battlefield clashes intensified along the front lines, with the “hottest” fighting reported around the embattled Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk.

Russian air defenses destroyed 56 drones overnight, the Defense Ministry said on December 28.

It said 28 drones were shot down in the Rostov region, 17 in the Voronezh region, and 11 in the Belgorod region, where local officials reportedly said two residents of a village were injured by shrapnel from a blast. The Russian claims could not be independently verified.

A Russian occupation official said on Telegram that four people were wounded in what he said was a Ukrainian drone attack that hit a car in the Russian-held city of Nova Kakhovka in Ukraine’s Kherson region early in the morning.

In Mykolayiv, the Ukrainian-held capital of a region adjacent to Kherson, the military said Ukrainian defenders had neutralized all 16 drones launched by Russia on December 28.

“Of the 16 UAVs launched, 15 were shot down, another one was a simulator. All 15 were shot down in the Mykolaiv region,” the Ukrainian Air Force said

Earlier, a Russian drone attack in the city caused fires on the roof of a five-story residential building and on the grounds of a commercial enterprise, regional governor Vitaliy Kim said on Telegra.

He said that nobody was hurt, and that the military had destroyed 12 drones over the region overnight.

Russia and Ukraine have used drones regularly since Russia launched the full-scale invasion of its neighbor in February 2022.

There are mounting suspicions that the crash of a Azerbaijan Airlines passenger jet earlier this week near Aqtau, Kazakhstan, that killed 38 of the 67 people aboard was caused by Russian air-defense systems on alert for Ukrainian drone attacks on the Chechnya region, where the jet was due to land in Grozny before it was diverted across the Caspian Sea.

Ukraine said its forces struck a “protected facility” of the Russian military in the Oryol region near the border with Ukraine. It said the target was a warehouse holding Iranian-made Shahed drones.

Also on December 28, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) claimed it had thwarted a plot to kill a high-level Russian military officer and an unnamed Russian “war blogger” who writes about the invasion.

The FSB, whose claim could not be independently verified, said it had arrested a Russian man it said was acting under instructions from Ukrainian military intelligence. It said it had found a cache outside Moscow with an improvised explosive device camouflaged as a stereo speaker.

There was no immediate comment from Ukraine on the FSB claim, which came 11 days after the general who headed Russia’s Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Defense Forces (RKhBZ) was killed, along with an assistant, by a bomb concealed in a scooter.

A source at Ukraine’s SBU security service told RFE/RL that the blast that killed Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov and his assistant was the result of a special operation by the Ukrainian agency.

In the United States, White House spokesman John Kirby on December 27 said Washington has reports of North Korean soldiers fighting alongside Russian troops “taking their own lives rather than surrendering to Ukrainian forces.”

He said the action was “likely out of fear of reprisal against their families in North Korea in the event that they’re captured. ”

In a video address, Zelenskiy had said “several” North Korean soldiers — badly wounded in fighting alongside Russian forces — have died after being captured by Ukrainian troops on the battlefield.

Zelenskiy said, without providing details, that Kyiv had reports of North Korean “enforcers” executing wounded soldiers to prevent them being captured alive by Ukrainian forces.

Western sources estimate that 12,000 North Korean troops are in Russia’s Kursk region, parts of which are occupied by Ukrainian forces amid ongoing pitched battles and reports of heavy losses.

With reporting by RFE/RL’s Russian and Ukrainian services