UN Security Council plans emergency meeting on Ukraine

NEW YORK

The U.N. Security Council will meet today to discuss Ukraine, a revised scheduled showed, after Kiev's mayor urged residents to leave the capital due to mass heating outages caused by Russian strikes.

"The Russian Federation has reached an appalling new level of war crimes and crimes against humanity by its terror against civilians," Ukrainian ambassador Andriy Melnyk said in a letter to the Security Council seen by AFP on Jan. 9.

The latest strikes left half of the residential buildings in Kiev without heating in sub-zero temperatures, Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said.

The Kremlin also confirmed firing an Oreshnik ballistic missile on Ukraine for the second time since the war began in February 2022.

"The Russian Federation regime officially claims that it used an intermediate-range ballistic missile, the so-called 'Oreshnik', against the Lviv region," the ambassador's letter continued.

"Such a strike represents a grave and unprecedented threat to the security of the European continent."

Moscow claims the Oreshnik, which can be equipped with both nuclear and conventional warheads, is impossible to stop

Ukraine's request for the emergency UNSC meeting was supported by six members, France, Latvia, Denmark, Greece, Liberia and the United Kingdom, diplomatic sources told AFP.

Meanwhile, a Ukrainian drone strike killed one person and wounded three others in the Russian city of Voronezh, local officials said yesterday.

A young woman died overnight in a hospital intensive care unit after debris from a drone fell on a house during the attack on Jan. 10, regional Gov. Alexander Gusev said on Telegram.

Three other people were wounded and more than 10 apartment buildings, private houses and a high school were damaged, he said, adding that air defenses shot down 17 drones over Voronezh. The city is home to just over 1 million people and lies some 250 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.

The attack came the day after Russia bombarded Ukraine with hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles overnight into Friday, killing at least four people in the capital Kiev, according to Ukrainian officials.

For only the second time in the nearly four-year war, Russia used a powerful new hypersonic missile that struck western Ukraine in a clear warning to Kiev and NATO.

The intense barrage and the launch of the Oreshnik missile followed reports of major progress in talks between Ukraine and its allies on how to defend the country from further aggression by Moscow if a U.S.-led peace deal is struck.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Jan. 10 in his nightly address that Ukrainian negotiators “continue to communicate with the American side.”

Chief negotiator Rustem Umerov was in contact with U.S. partners on Jan. 10, he said.