January 16, 2023 Russia-Ukraine news

Ukrainian troops have arrived at Fort Sill in Oklahoma to begin training on the Patriot missile system, the US Army base announced Monday. 

CNN was first to report that the training was set to begin as soon as this week.

Fort Sill is home to the Fires Center of Excellence where the US conducts Patriot training for its own military and other countries.  

The training will take “several months” on the advanced but complex long-range aerial defense system, according to Pentagon officials. It’s not clear how much the military can accelerate the training program.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday called the Russian attack on an apartment building in Dnipro a “war crime” and vowed to bring its perpetrators to justice.

“There is no doubt: everyone who is guilty of this war crime will be identified and brought to justice,” Zelensky said in his evening address. 

At least 40 people have died and 25 remain missing following the attack.

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) named six members of the Russian military whom it claimed were involved in the strike, according to what the agency described as "preliminary investigation" findings.

Russian fighters from the Wagner private military company appear to have captured the main train station west of Soledar, the town in the Donetsk region over which Russia appeared to have largely established control last week, according to a video posted on Wagner’s Telegram channel Monday.

CNN has been unable to verify that claim and Ukrainian and Russian authorities have not commented on the claim.  

The station is Sil (or Sol, in Russian) just about three kilometers northwest of Soledar and about 14 kilometers north of Bakhmut. It lies along the main north-south railway and road.

In the video, seven Russian fighters are holding a Wagner flag in front of Sil’s train station. “Well, look here, we've taken Sol,” one man says. The men then fire their weapons in the air, and the camera pans to the rail tracks.

In the Ukrainian military’s regular update Monday morning, it said that an attack on Sil had been repelled “over the past 24 hours.”

Rescuers in Dnipro, Ukraine, have removed 8,500 metric tons of debris in an effort to rescue victims of Russia’s strike on an apartment block Saturday.

The State Emergencies Service (SES) said that 25 people are still missing.

The SES said that as of 2 p.m. ET (9 p.m. local), the toll still stood at 40 killed, 77 injured (including 14 children) and 39 rescued. From 47 reports of missing people, 18 have been confirmed dead, four were found alive at relatives’ houses or in the hospital and 25 are still missing.

“Psychologists of the State Emergencies Service provided assistance to 174 victims,” the SES said. “In total, 418 people and 60 units of equipment are engaged in the works, including 65 people and 21 units of equipment from the State Emergencies Service.”

Correction: An earlier version of this post included the wrong amount of debris removed from the Dnipro site. It is 8,500 metric tons.

The collapse of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure “could happen any second,” Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said Monday.

Klitschko’s warning comes amid a winter that has seen millions of Ukrainians without access to electricity, water, and central heating as a result of relentless Russian strikes on critical energy infrastructure. 

“Now in Ukraine it's pretty cold – negative 10, negative 20, sometimes in winter negative 30 degrees. And in these weather conditions, to live without electricity, to live without heating is almost impossible, and that's why the situation is critical, we're fighting to survive,” Klitschko said.

The British defense secretary said Monday that Ukraine needed a “new level of support” to expel Russian troops from its territory, after announcing the donation of main battle tanks for the country.

“That requires a new level of support — the combat power only achieved by combinations of main battle tank squadrons operating alongside divisional artillery groups, and further deep precision fires, enabling targeting of Russian logistics and command nodes at greater distance," he said.

Wallace said that the UK would send “a squadron of Challenger 2 tanks, with armored recovery and repair vehicles” to Ukraine. He called it “the most significant package of combat power to date to accelerate Ukrainian success.”

 It is the first time that western main battle tanks will be sent to Ukraine, Wallace said.

He also said that the UK would send Ukraine AS-90 self-propelled artillery, and “hundreds more armored and protective vehicles.”

Wallace called the replacement of Russia’s commander for its war in Ukraine “the visible tip of an iceberg of factionalism in the Russian command.” 

“Putin apparently remains bullish. And with Gerasimov’s deference to the president never in doubt, we now would expect a trend back towards a Russian offensive, no matter how much loss of life accompanies it.”

Ukraine’s military warned on Monday that the joint Russia-Belarus aviation drills that began Monday were a “guise.”

“There is a high danger of further Russian air and missile strikes on objects throughout Ukraine,” Ukraine’s General Staff said in its regular evening statement on Monday.

Kyiv has, for some time, warned that Russia may once again attempt an invasion of Ukraine from Belarus. 

Military exercises in Belarus were “sufficient to threaten Ukraine,” and Kyiv was “closely monitoring what is being transferred from Russia to the territory of Belarus,” Serhii Naev, commander of the Joint Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, had said on Dec. 20.

Earlier this month, the Belarusian Ministry of Defense announced that Minsk and Moscow were planning to hold joint aviation drills from January 16 to February 1.

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said Monday that it had examined the wreckage of the munition that hit an apartment building in the city of Dnipro on Saturday and that it was identified as a cruise missile.

The SBU also named six members of the Russian military whom it claimed were involved in the strike, according to what the agency described as "preliminary investigation" findings.

“As a result of the inspection of the tragedy site, the type of Russian cruise missile Kh-22, which the enemy hit the residential building, was preliminarily confirmed,” the SBU said in a statement Monday.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov claimed Monday that a Ukrainian air-defense missile had hit the apartment building, without presenting evidence.

“Each Russian war crime has a specific perpetrator,” SBU chief Vasyl Maliuk said, in a statement. “The Security Service will identify and publish all of them by name – so that no murderer escapes punishment.”

Some more context: A Russian missile strike on a Dnipro apartment building has left at least 40 people dead, making it one of the deadliest single attacks of the war, and the deadliest in months.

Dnipro is still reeling after a Russian cruise missile struck a nine-story apartment building in the central Ukrainian city on early Saturday afternoon, killing at least 40 people and injuring another 75, with 46 people reported missing.

The core of that building is now gone, transformed into a mountain of jumbled concrete. Apartments were sliced in half when the missile – with a warhead of nearly one metric ton – penetrated all the way to the basement.

Here are some pictures from the ground: