Ukraine’s Zelensky sends Christmas warning: ‘In the end, darkness will lose’

On Christmas Eve, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed his compatriots with a Christmas message of encouragement in the face of Russia’s invasion.

“In the end, darkness will lose. Evil will be defeated,” Zelensky said in the video message published on Sunday.

He added that the whole country would pray together during the holidays “for our freedom. For our victory. For our Ukraine.”

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Zelensky thanked Ukrainian soldiers who are spending Christmas in the trenches at the front, and also shared his thoughts with all the families who will once again have to celebrate this year without husbands, sons and fathers who are fighting.

“All our warriors of light, the guardian angels of Ukraine,” Zelensky said. “They prove that miracles exist, but we must create them ourselves.”

Only the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which has long been linked to Moscow, has stuck with the old date.

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Meanwhile, Russian shelling in southern Ukraine’s Kherson region killed four people on Sunday, including an 87-year-old man and his 81-year-old wife who died after a strike on their block of flats.

The barrage injured nine other people, including a 15-year-old, sparked fires in homes and at a private medical facility, and set a local gas pipeline alight, the head of the regional military administration, Oleksandr Prokudin, said.

“There are no holidays for the enemy,” Andriy Yermak, the head of the Ukrainian president’s office, wrote on social media, commenting on the Kherson attack. “They do not exist for us as long as the enemy kills our people and remains on our land.”

A woman lights a candle at the Saint John the Theologian Church in Kharkiv, Ukraine on Sunday. Photo: AFP

Kherson was not the only region of Ukraine to come under attack on Sunday. Russian forces launched 15 drone strikes overnight, and 14 of the Iranian-made Shahed drones were destroyed over the Mykolaiv, Kirovohrad, Zaporizhzhya, Dnipropetrovsk, and Khmelnytsky regions, the Ukrainian air force reported.

Also on Sunday, two people were wounded during the Russian shelling of 20 towns and villages across northern Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, Governor Oleh Syniehubov said.

In Russia, a man was injured in the Bryansk region after a village close to the Ukrainian border came under fire, the region’s governor, Alexander Bogomaz, said.

Additional reporting by Associated Press