Five killed in Russian attacks on Kherson as Ukraine marks Christmas on 25 December for first time

Birth of Christ was formerly celebrated on 7 January, but has moved in symbolic shift away from Russia

Russian shelling in southern Ukraine’s Kherson region has killed five people, including an 87-year-old man and his 81-year-old wife who died after a strike on their apartment building.

The barrage on Sunday 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.”

The shelling across Kherson reached the centre of the region’s capital city of the same name.

Russian forces abandoned the city on the Dnipro river in southern Ukraine, and the western bank of the river over a year ago but have since subjected many areas there to constant shelling from their positions on the eastern bank.

Regional police said three people, including the elderly couple, died in shelling of an apartment building and a private home in Kherson city. A woman died in a drone attack in a small town south of Kherson and a second woman was killed when a town further north came under heavy fire.

Some 600 km (400 miles) northeast of Kherson in the town of Horlivka, an area of Ukraine’s Donetsk region under Russian control, Ukraine’s shelling destroyed a shopping centre and several other buildings, a Russian-installed official said.

The attacks killed one woman and wounded six civilians, the Russian-installed mayor of Horlivka, Ivan Prikhodko, said on the Telegram messaging app. Neither the Russian nor the Ukrainian reports could be independently verified.

The assault took place as Ukraine prepared to officially celebrate Christmas for the first time on 25 December, in a symbolic shift away from the Russian Orthodox church, which observes the birth of Christ on 7 January.

Some Orthodox Ukrainians observed Christmas on 25 December last year in response to Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

The cathedral in the Monastery of the Caves, a Unesco world heritage site in Kyiv, held its Christmas celebration on 7 January of this year, but the service was held in the Ukrainian language for the first time in the 31 years of Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy signed legislation in July moving the public Christmas Day holiday to 25 December, although one of Ukraine’s two competing Orthodox church organisations is sticking with the January date dictated by the Julian calendar. To mark Christmas Eve on 24 December, Zelenskiy addressed the nation in a video filmed in front of the floodlit St Sophia Cathedral in central Kyiv.

He reassured Ukrainians fighting against Russia’s invasion of the country that “step by step, day by day, the darkness is losing”.

“Today, this is our common goal, our common dream. And this is precisely what our common prayer is for today. For our freedom. For our victory. For our Ukraine,” Zelenskiy said.

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, Zaporizhziya, Dnipropetrovsk, and Khmelnytskyi regions, the Ukrainian air force reported.

Meanwhile, two people were wounded during the Russian shelling of 20 towns and villages across northern Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, said its governor, Oleh Syniehubov.

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.

Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report

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