LIVE – War in Ukraine: Zelensky received this Wednesday by the Secretary General of NATO in Brussels

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged his Western allies on Tuesday, December 17, to “urgently strengthen Ukraine on the battlefield”while kyiv’s forces have been retreating for months against the Russian army. “The main thing that will unite us”during the meeting on Thursday with the Europeans in Brussels, “is to determine how to urgently strengthen Ukraine on the battlefield, politically, and geopolitically”declared Mr. Zelensky, during a press conference with the Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, in Lviv.

Volodymyr Zelensky will be received this Wednesday by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte with European leaders in Brussels.

Minute by minute

A senior Russian army officer was killed on Tuesday (new window) in an explosion near a residential building in the south-east of Moscow, an attack claimed in kyiv, in the midst of the Russian offensive in Ukraine. General Kirillov, 54, sanctioned in October by London for the alleged deployment of chemical weapons in Ukraine, is the most senior Russian military official known to have been killed since the start of the Russian offensive against its Ukrainian neighbor in February 2022.

Ukraine, for its part, reported on Tuesday the participation of North Korean troops in a counter-offensive “intense” launched by the Russian army to regain control in its Kursk region, a small part of which has been occupied since August by Ukrainian forces.