Ukraine Breaking News Today Live on 01-05-2025

After months of Kyiv’s troops gradually giving ground to Russian and now North Korean forces, a new offensive puts Moscow on the back foot again. This is a developing story.

The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) launched a new Kursk offensive early Sunday morning, according to multiple social media reports.

President Zelensky’s chief-of-staff, Andriy Yermak, acknowledged as much in a cryptic Telegram post, saying: “Kursk region, good news, Russia is getting what it deserves.”

Kyiv says over 100,000 Russians are missing in action, with many scattered across Ukrainian fields, “their remains carried away by dogs,” but “identification is of no interest” to Moscow.

Tens of thousands of Russians whose relatives went missing while fighting in Ukraine have sought help from a Ukrainian agency tasked with identifying war dead, its chief has said.

Ukraine’s “I Want to Find” project has received more than 50,000 requests from families of Russian servicemen to help confirm whether their loved ones were killed in action, according to Bohdan Okhrimenko.

Ukraine’s Minister of Culture and Strategic Communications, Mykola Tochytsky, explains why the cultural sphere, and its defense, is so important for Ukraine.

2025 will be the year of cultural conservation and resilience. It is crucial to make sure no crime against cultural heritage goes unpunished

The Russian Empire has consistently expropriated our history, seeking to eradicate our culture, and with it our self-identity. In the third year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, awareness has clearly crystallized that culture is a fundamental element to our national security.

Re-establishing democratic institutions will be crucial to rebuilding public confidence, facilitating social cohesion, and addressing the grievances created by the war.

As the calendar turns to 2025, the Russian war in Ukraine has unfolded amid shifting strategies, diplomatic ambitions, and escalating pressures both at home and abroad.

The war, now deeply entrenched in the fabric of European geopolitics, has led Ukraine to pursue increasingly aggressive defence strategies, shifting the fight to Russian territory and raising the stakes for both armies.

The world in focus, as seen by a Canadian leading global affairs analyst, writer and speaker, in his review of international media.

Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for The Washington Post, said on Friday evening that she was resigning after the newspaper’s opinions section rejected a cartoon depicting The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, genuflecting toward a statue of President-elect Donald J. Trump. In a brief statement posted to Substack, Ms. Telnaes — who has worked at The Post since 2008 — called the newspaper’s decision to kill her cartoon a “game changer” that was “dangerous for a free press.” She added: “In all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at,” she wrote. “Until now.” Ms. Telnaes included a draft of her cartoon in her Substack post. In addition to Mr. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, the cartoon depicted Meta’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg; Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of The Los Angeles Times; and Mickey Mouse, the corporate mascot of the Walt Disney Company.

President-elect Donald Trump complained on Friday that American flags would still be lowered to half-staff in honor of the late President Jimmy Carter during Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration. President Joe Biden ordered flags lowered to half-staff for 30 days from the day of Carter’s death on Dec. 29, as is custom when a U.S. president dies. Trump, who has announced plans to attend Carter’s memorial service in Washington on Jan. 9, took issue in a Truth Social post on Friday with the flags remaining in the mourning position during his swearing-in ceremony. “The Democrats are all ‘giddy’ about our magnificent American Flag potentially being at ‘half mast’ during my Inauguration,” Trump said, employing a term frequently used for the lowered position when the flag is on a ship. “They think it’s so great, and are so happy about it because, in actuality, they don’t love our Country, they only think about themselves,” Trump said. Trump said that due to Carter’s death last week the American flag would “for the first time ever during an Inauguration of a future President, be at half mast.” - Reuters

Among other things, the Russians destroyed government documents pertaining to births, death, marriages, businesses and real estate.

The end of 2024 turned out to be dramatic for Ukraine not only on the front line. Ten days before the New Year, Russia carried out their largest and, it must be admitted, most effective cyberattack on the Ukrainian government system, destroying state electronic registries of real estate, businesses, births, deaths, marriages, and many other databases.

As a result of this attack, all real estate transactions were put on hold. It is also still unclear whether backup copies of the registers were damaged or whether the data was interfered with in any way.

Atesh collected data on Moscow’s Aerospace Force Arsenal in the Tambov region, including routine activity on the premises, equipment, transportation, and personal info on Russians serving at the base.

A field agent working as part of the underground network set up by the pro-Ukrainian ATESH movement in Russia and occupied areas gathered personal data of Russian military service members from the 28th Aerospace Force Arsenal in Tambov region.

That’s according to the ATESH guerilla movement, Ukrinform reports.

The Transnistria region bordering Ukraine has been unable to provide heating and hot water to its residents since Wednesday, when Moscow cut off gas supplies to Moldova over a financial dispute.

The separatist Moldovan region of Transnistria ordered a second day of rolling blackouts on Saturday, as a shutdown in Russian gas supplies starved the pro-Moscow self-proclaimed state of energy.

The tiny breakaway region bordering Ukraine has been unable to provide heating and hot water to its residents since Wednesday, when Moscow cut off gas supplies to Moldova over a financial dispute.

Warsaw-born photographer Wojciech Grzędziński spends much of his time deep in the red zone to document the unrelenting horrors unleashed by Vladimir Putin.

As portfolios go, Wojciech Grzędziński’s photographs span a motley mixture of topics, ranging from piano concerts and presidents to road trips and celebs—it is his images of war, however, that have thrust this photographer into the international spotlight.

In recent years, war has meant Ukraine, with the Warsaw-born Grzędziński spending much of his time deep in the red zone to document the unrelenting horrors unleashed by Vladimir Putin.

Kyiv’s use of US ATACMS has infuriated the Kremlin, which has threatened to hit central Kyiv with a hypersonic ballistic missile in response to the strikes.

Russia on Saturday vowed to retaliate after it accused Ukraine of firing US-supplied ATACMS missiles at the border region of Belgorod the previous day.

Outgoing US President Joe Biden authorized Kyiv to use the long-range weapons against Russia last year, in a move Moscow denounced as a grave escalation of the nearly three-year conflict.

Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture addresses UNESCO to establish a mechanism to preserve and protect important built heritage and create a database for buildings requiring restoration.

Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture and Strategic Communications wants to work with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to create a means of restoring historical buildings following damage regularly caused by Russian strikes and shelling of Kyiv’s city center.

Whilst limited on detail, the Ministry’s press release calls for “the establishment of a mechanism for preserving and protecting the architectural integrity of the streets in the historic center of the capital, regardless of the status or ownership of the buildings.”

The Institute for Economic Research has published its first estimation of how well Ukraine’s economy did in 2024.

By the end of 2024, Ukraine demonstrated moderate economic growth of 3.8%, according to preliminary estimates by the Institute for Economic Research and Policy Consulting (IER).

The IER projects real GDP growth of approximately 3% in 2025, the institute said in a press release.