These are the key developments from day 1,429 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Published On 23 Jan 2026
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Here is where things stand on Friday, January 23:
Fighting
- Two volunteers delivering bread were killed in a Russian drone attack on their car in the border community of Derhachi in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, the head of the regional military administration, Vyacheslav Zadorenko, wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
- Russian forces launched a drone attack on a high-rise residential building in Ukraine’s Dnipro, injuring at least seven people, the city’s Mayor Borys Filatov said.
- One person was killed, and four were wounded in Russian glide bomb attacks on Komyshuvakha, in Ukraine’s Zaporizhia region, Governor Ivan Fedorov said.
- A Russian attack on Kryvyi Rih city, in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, injured 12 people, including four children, head of the regional military administration, Oleksandr Hanzha, said.
- Russian forces shot down 31 Ukrainian drones overnight and into the early hours of Thursday, Russia’s Ministry of Defence said, according to a report by Russia’s TASS state news agency.
Sanctions
- The French navy intercepted an oil tanker in the Mediterranean Sea that officials said belongs to Russia’s so-called “shadow fleet”, designed to evade international sanctions.
- French President Emmanuel Macron said the oil tanker was “coming from Russia, subject to international sanctions and suspected of flying a false flag”. He added that the operation was “carried out in strict compliance with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea” and together with allies.
Energy crisis
- Ukraine’s energy system on Thursday endured its most difficult day since a widespread blackout hit the network in November 2022, and the situation remains “extremely difficult”, the country’s Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal said.
- Conditions were most difficult in the capital Kyiv and the surrounding region and in the southeastern Dnipropetrovsk region, Shmyhal said, as nighttime temperatures fell to -10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit).
- Kyiv’s Mayor Vitali Klitschko said 2,600 apartment buildings were still without heat two days after the latest overnight Russian attacks, while 600 buildings have had their heating restored.
Politics and diplomacy
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukrainian negotiators are on their way to the United Arab Emirates for talks with Russian and United States negotiating teams.
“Our team is now heading to the Emirates for meetings with both the American and Russian sides,” Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram after a day of talks at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. “We are waiting to see how it goes and will decide on the next steps.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin began a meeting with US envoys Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner and Josh Gruenbaum late on Thursday to discuss a plan to end the war in Ukraine, the Kremlin said.
US President Donald Trump again said that both Russian President Putin and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy would like to make a deal to end the nearly four-year-old war, after meeting with Zelenskyy on the sidelines of the WEF in Davos.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Thursday he “obviously” had concerns about Putin being on Trump’s proposed “Board of Peace” in an interview with Channel 4 News. “He is waging war on a European country. They’re raining down bombs on Ukraine,” Starmer said.
The relationship between the US and the European Union has “taken a big blow” in the past week, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said in advance of an emergency meeting of the bloc’s leaders on Thursday.
“Disagreements that allies have between them, like Europe and America, are just benefitting our adversaries who are looking and enjoying the view,” Kallas told reporters.
- Russian Human Rights Commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova told reporters that two Russian soldiers whose bodies were returned as part of a prisoner exchange deal with Ukraine late last year had been alive, without injuries, at the time of their capture in May 2025. Al Jazeera could not independently verify the report.
Military aid
- Norway’s Defence Minister Tore O Sandvik said that his country has “quickly delivered air defence missiles to Ukraine at a critical stage so that the NASAMS system can continue to protect Ukrainian citizens from deadly air strikes” in “cooperation with the United States and others”.
