Outgoing United States President Joe Biden has directed the country's Department of Defense to continue delivering weapons to Ukraine, on the same day Russia launched a Christmas missile attack on Ukrainian energy infrastructure in multiple cities.
The strikes targeted power stations in the north-eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv and the south-eastern Dnipro region killed at least one person and injured six more as the country woke on Christmas Day.
In the aftermath of the missile strikes, half a million people in the Kharkiv region were left without heating in temperatures just a few degrees Celsius above zero, while there were blackouts in the capital Kyiv and elsewhere.