These are the major developments since the 1,421st day of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Published on January 15, 2026
Here’s what happened on Thursday, January 15:
fights
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said a state of emergency was being declared for Ukraine’s energy sector, after repeated Russian attacks destroyed power and heat infrastructure.
- Zelensky said he asked the government to review curfew restrictions “in this very cold weather”.
- Kateryna Pop, spokeswoman for the Kyiv City Military Administration, said 471 buildings in the Ukrainian capital remained without heat on Wednesday as temperatures fell again to minus 19 degrees Celsius (-2.2 Fahrenheit) overnight, Ukraine’s Ukrainform news agency reported.
- Ukraine’s Ministry of Development announced the mandatory evacuation of children from five settlements in Ukraine’s front-line Zaporizhia region, according to Ukraine’s Interfax news agency.
- “In the face of the constant threat of gunfire, this is the only responsible step that allows saving lives, primarily children,” Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said, according to Interfax.
- An 84-year-old woman and a 65-year-old man were wounded in a Russian guided bomb attack in Tavariske, Zaporizhia, regional governor Ivan Fedorov said on Telegram.
- According to Ukraine’s battlefield monitoring site Deepstat, Russian forces have advanced near Zaliznyanske in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, Yablunivka in Lviv region and Stepanohirsk in Zaporizhia.
- More than 3,000 people in the Russian-occupied region of Zaporizhia are without electricity because of the Ukrainian attack, Russian-appointed local official Yevgen Balitsky said on Telegram.
- According to Russia’s TASS state news agency, a Ukrainian drone attack hit a power station in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine’s Luhansk region, leaving several settlements without power.
politics
- According to Interfax, Ukraine’s parliament fired President Zelensky’s defense minister a few weeks after approving his nomination as energy minister and first deputy prime minister, Denis Shmyahl, a position he had held since July 17, 2025.
- According to Interfax, parliament also approved the nomination of Mykhailo Fedorov as Ukraine’s new defense minister. Fedorov is the fourth person to hold the post since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
- Fedorov quickly outlined his criticism of Ukraine’s defense forces, telling parliament: “I don’t want to be a populist, I want to be a realist”.
- “The Ministry of Defense has in my hands minus 300 billion, two million Ukrainians who are wanted, and 200,000 absent without leave (AWOL). Therefore, we must decide, we must do our homework on the problems that exist today, so that we can move forward,” he said, according to Interfax.
Diplomacy
- Russia summoned the United Kingdom’s charge d’affaires in Moscow without immediate reason, TASS said on Wednesday.
Attack on the Black Sea
Russia’s foreign affairs ministry on Wednesday condemned drone attacks on oil tankers near a terminal on its Black Sea coast and accused Ukraine of attacking commercial vessels.
“We strongly condemn yet another terrorist attack by the Kiev government on commercial civilian vessels that comply with all norms of international law,” the foreign ministry said. Ukraine has not commented on Tuesday’s incident.
- Kazakhstan’s foreign ministry said in a statement on Wednesday that three tankers en route to the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) terminal had been hit by a drone strike and called on the United States and Europe to help secure oil transport.
- “The increasing frequency of such incidents highlights the growing risk to the functioning of international energy infrastructure,” the ministry said.