Yulia Lemeshchenko was defiant and did not deny the accusations, saying she had decided to fight against Russian military aggression

At the beginning of autumn 2023, Yulia Lemeshchenko stopped appearing at the Kharkiv gym where she trained most days. A driven athlete, whose talent for weightlifting led her to become champion of Ukraine in 2021, her disappearance prompted confusion among her training partners.

Months later, she resurfaced in a Moscow courtroom, accused of plotting sabotage and assassinations in Russia on behalf of the Ukrainian security services. Prosecutors claimed Lemeshchenko had blown up power lines outside St Petersburg and had later travelled to Voronezh, where she was staking out a Russian air force commander with a view to killing him.

The US president’s fears about ‘woke’ Europe are laughable. He would feel right at home in today’s EU

I expected the EU to push back strongly against Donald Trump’s new national security strategy. Not only does it show contempt for the EU and its “weak” leaders, but it also targets European citizens and migrants with racist dog whistles and barely disguised Islamophobia. Yet instead of a rousing defence of the bloc’s commitment to human rights and equality, there have just been bland platitudes.

António Costa, the president of the European Council, denounced Trump’s plans to boost support for Europe’s far-right parties. But there was no public challenge to the racist logic underpinning his argument. Costa, who has spoken proudly of his mixed ancestry, could have made a convincing counterargument to the US president’s false premise that Europe was heading for “civilisational erasure” because of migrants and, by extension, millions of Europeans of colour.

Shada Islam is a Brussels-based commentator on EU affairs. She runs New Horizons Project, a strategy, analysis and advisory company

Kyiv hit Moscow with drones every day of this year, Russian officials say as drone attacks intensify

The Valais region police force published a statement on Sunday confirming that all 40 people killed in the fire have now been identified.

Russia’s defence ministry said Ukraine had targeted Moscow with drones every day of 2026 so far. What we know on day 1,412

Russia’s defence ministry claimed that Ukraine has targeted Moscow with drones every day of 2026 so far, in what would mark an escalation from earlier, more sporadic attacks on the Russian capital. By midnight on Sunday alone, Russian air defence systems had destroyed 57 drones over the Moscow region out of 437 downed over Russia, the ministry said. There was no immediate comment from Ukraine, but Kyiv has increasingly used long range drones to strike targets deep inside Russia. Ukraine says such attacks aim to disrupt military logistics and energy infrastructure, raise costs for Moscow’s war effort and respond to repeated Russian missile and drone attacks in the war that Russia launched nearly four years ago.

Three out of four of Moscow’s airports shut to air traffic on Sunday after Ukraine launched dozens of drones, authorities said. The attacks led to multiple flight delays, including at Moscow’s second-busiest airport of Vnukovo, Russian media reported. The disruption comes during Russia’s extended New Year and Orthodox Christmas break, when many Russians take vacations and travel domestically and abroad, making it one of the country’s busiest periods for transport and tourism.

Two people were killed in Ukrainian drone strikes in Russian border regions, local officials said on Sunday. Belgorod’s governor said one person died and two others, including a young child, were wounded when a Ukrainian drone struck a car. Another person was killed in a drone strike on a village in the Kursk region, the region’s governor said.

Russia launched overnight strikes on Kyiv province killed two people, Ukrainian authorities said Monday, after a countrywide air alert was issued. One person was killed in the capital, according to Tymur Tkachenko, the head of the city’s military administration. And in the neighbouring city of Fastiv, a man in his 70s also died, Mykola Kalashnyk, the Kyiv regional governor, said.

In Ukraine, three people were wounded in the Kharkiv region in drone strikes from Saturday into Sunday, the country’s state emergency service said. Meanwhile, the death toll from a Russian missile attack on the city of Kharkiv on Friday increased to five when body parts were found under the rubble of a building, Kharkiv mayor Ihor Terekhov said.

A Ukrainian drone attack sparked a fire in an industrial zone in the town of Yelets in Russia’s Lipetsk region, the regional governor said. There were no casualties reported. Yelets is home to the Energiya battery plant, a major producer of batteries and accumulators for Russia’s defence industry, which Ukraine said it has hit in the past.

Hundreds of people join silent procession in Swiss town, with youngest known victim just 14-years-old

• Visual guide: what happened in Crans-Montana?

Investigators have identified the last 16 people who died in the New Year’s Eve bar fire at the Swiss mountain resort of Crans-Montana, police said on Sunday.

Officers in Valais canton said they had managed to identify the last of the 40 bodies from the blaze, one of the worst disasters in recent Swiss history, with forensic work particularly slow-going due to the horrific burns sustained by most of the victims.

Protest over climate crisis and AI has cut power to tens of thousands of homes which may take days to fully restore

German leftwing militants protesting over the climate crisis and AI have claimed responsibility for an arson attack that cut power to tens of thousands of households in Berlin.

The fire that broke out on a bridge across the Teltow canal in the south-west of the capital early on Saturday could deprive up to 35,000 homes and 1,900 businesses of electricity – and in many cases heat – until 8 January, the grid company Stromnetz Berlin said.