These are the key developments from day 1,393 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Published On 18 Dec 2025
Here is where things stand on Thursday, December 18:
Fighting
Ukrainian drones have hit a tanker vessel in the southern Russian port of Rostov-on-Don, killing and injuring a number of people and igniting a fire, the city’s mayor, Alexander Skryabin, said.
“Emergency teams are extinguishing the fire on the tanker that was struck while docked in a drone attack,” Skryabin said, according to Russian news agencies.
Ukraine’s military said it struck infrastructure at the Slavyansk oil refinery in Russia’s Krasnodar region overnight.
Russian glide bomb attacks on apartment blocks in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia wounded 26 people, including a child, regional Governor Ivan Fedorov said. Fedorov said three strikes hit the regional capital and its outskirts, and two apartment blocks had been badly damaged.
Ukraine’s military has said it now controls nearly 90 percent of Kupiansk, refuting Russian claims that a Ukrainian counterattack on the strategic northeastern town had been unsuccessful. Kyiv denied Moscow’s claim last month that Russian troops had taken full control of the town, before announcing last week it had itself retaken parts of Kupiansk in an operation that encircled Russian troops.
Russian forces have captured the village of Herasymivka in the Dnipropetrovsk region of eastern Ukraine, Moscow’s Ministry of Defence claimed.
Peace deal
At an annual Defence Ministry meeting, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow would take more land in Ukraine by force if Kyiv and its European allies, whom he cast as “young pigs”, did not engage with US proposals for a peace settlement to end the war.
“If the opposing side and their foreign patrons refuse to engage in substantive discussions, Russia will achieve the liberation of its historical lands by military means,” Putin told the meeting.
United States and Russian officials are expected to hold talks in Miami, Florida, this weekend about a possible deal to end the war in Ukraine, US news outlet Politico reported, citing two people familiar with the matter.
US envoy Steve Witkoff and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner are expected to be part of Washington’s delegation at the Miami meeting, according to Politico, which also reported that Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, will be part of Moscow’s negotiating team.
Military aid
The US Senate has passed a compromise version of the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act providing $800m for Ukraine – $400m over each of the next two years – as part of the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which pays US companies to produce weapons for Ukraine’s military.
The act also authorises the Baltic Security Initiative, providing $175m to support the defence of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, and limits the US Department of Defense’s ability to reduce the number of American troops in Europe to fewer than 76,000.
The nearly $1 trillion bill, passed by the House of Representatives last week, will now be sent to the White House for Trump to sign it into law.
Norway’s government said it will purchase ammunition for Ukraine’s F-16 fighter jets and other air defence systems, including long-range missiles, worth 3.2 billion Norwegian crowns ($290m).
Sanctions
The European Parliament approved the bloc’s plan to phase out Russian gas imports by late 2027, clearing the penultimate legal hurdle before the ban can pass into law. The Russian gas ban still requires formal approval at a meeting of European Union ministers, expected early next year.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on Kyiv’s allies to show Russia that continuing its war is “pointless”, before a crucial EU summit on Moscow’s frozen assets, which will be held on Thursday and could see nearly $250bn of Russian sovereign assets, currently frozen in EU banks, used as a loan for Ukraine.
Speaking in advance of the EU summit, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said finding a legal way to use the frozen Russian assets remains “far from easy”. Meloni warned that doing so without a solid legal basis would hand Moscow “the first victory since the start of the war”.
A Moscow court will hold a preliminary hearing on January 16 on the Russian central bank’s lawsuit against Belgian depository Euroclear over plans to use the frozen Russian assets to support Ukraine.
Russia’s central bank filed a lawsuit in Moscow this week seeking $230bn in damages from Euroclear, marking the first step in what the Kremlin has warned will be a legal nightmare for the EU should it use Russian assets to help Ukraine.
The US is preparing a further round of sanctions on Russia’s energy sector to increase the pressure on Moscow should Putin reject a peace agreement with Ukraine, Bloomberg News reports, citing people familiar with the matter.
The US has extended a waiver allowing oil sales from Russia’s Sakhalin-2 project through June 18 next year, a move that likely allows production of liquefied natural gas from the project to continue. The general licence, issued by the US Treasury Department, is important for Japan, which gets about 9 percent of its LNG from Russia.
Britain said it was giving Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich a final chance to give Ukraine 2.5 billion pounds ($3.33bn) from the sale of Chelsea Football Club or face potential legal action.
Britain sanctioned Abramovich in a crackdown on Russian oligarchs after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, triggering a rushed sale of the football club and freezing of the proceeds. Britain wants the funds spent on humanitarian causes in Ukraine.
Abramovich has 90 days to act under the terms of the government’s new licence. Should the Russian businessman fail to free the funds quickly, the government said in a statement that it was prepared to take him to court.
Regional security
Poland has decided to start producing antipersonnel mines for the first time since the Cold War and plans to deploy them along its eastern border and may export them to Ukraine, Polish Deputy Defence Minister Pawel Zalewski told the Reuters news agency. Poland wants to use antipersonnel mines to beef up its borders with Belarus and Russia.
Russian affairs
Russia will spend 5.1 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on the war in Ukraine in 2025, Defence Minister Andrei Belousov said, providing the first official estimate of how much the conflict will cost the state budget this year. Based on the Economy Ministry’s 2025 GDP estimate of 217 trillion roubles ($2.70 trillion), war expenditure will amount to 11 trillion roubles ($136bn).
