Kyiv welcomes 2023 with air raid sirens and bombardment

Party-goers in Kyiv saw in the start of 2023 under attack from Russian drones, including one that had "Happy New Year" scrawled on its tailfin in red marker pen.

Eyewitnesses described how they sheltered in basements for several hours during the attacks shortly after midnight. Children sang Christmas carols and the Ukrainian national anthem to keep up morale.

Some high-spirited New Year’s Eve revellers stood on balconies and cheered “Glory to Ukraine!” as they watched police shoot down several Russian drones.

Police said that nobody was injured or killed in the drone attacks. They later uploaded photos that showed destroyed drones, including a broken tailfin with the Russian New Year greeting and a crude, childish drawing of a bomb.

"That is everything you need to know about the terror state and its army," said Andriy Nebitov, head of Kyiv's police.

It was the second major Russian attack on Ukraine within 24 hours. At lunchtime on December 31, missile attacks on Kyiv and Khmelnytskyi, in western Ukraine, killed two people and injured 50.

Russia’s ministry of defence claimed that both attacks had struck Ukraine’s drone production facilities. Ukrainian drones have hit air bases inside Russia over the past few weeks and on New Year’s Eve the Russian military, clearly jittery, placed the Moscow air defence systems on high alert.

Russia wants to destroy Ukraine's heating infrastructure to undermine civilian morale over the winter, but although this winter has been more uncomfortable than usual, observers have said that 10 months of war have hardened the Ukrainian population.

"Russia coldly and cowardly attacked Ukraine in the early hours of the new year,” the US ambassador to Ukraine, Bridget Brink, said. “But Putin still does not seem to understand that Ukrainians are made of iron."

Less than an hour before the drone attacks, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had referenced this tough Ukrainian spirit in his New Year’s Eve address.

“Millions of us made a choice,” he said of Ukrainians' decision to fight the Russian army after it invaded in February. “Not a white flag, but a blue and yellow flag. Not escaping, but meeting. Meeting the enemy. Resisting and fighting.”

It was a defiant, emotional performance from Mr Zelensky, who at times appeared to be close to tears.

He rattled off the names of the towns subjected to Russian war crimes and then the names of the areas that Ukraine had recaptured from Russia, essentially a list of his army’s new battle honours.

Whereas Vladimir Putin’s New Year’s Eve address had bordered on being an apology to Russians for the hardships that his war in Ukraine had forced on them and a demand for loyalty, Mr Zelensky focused on how ordinary Ukrainians had united to defend their country.

“We fight as one team. The whole country, all our regions. I admire you all,” he said.

Mr Zelensky has earned praise for his leadership and inspirational speeches and for remaining in Kyiv throughout the war.

He signed off his 17-minute New Year’s Eve address with a nod to perhaps his most important speech of the war, made on a gloomy evening the day after Russia invaded when Ukrainian soldiers were desperately battling Russian forces at the city gates.

Then, in a message videoed on his mobile phone, Mr Zelensky and his key ministers had assured Ukrainians that they were not going to flee Kyiv with the now invincible words: “We are all here”.

Now, in his New Year’s Eve address to Ukrainians, Mr Zelensky renewed this pledge.

“I'm here,” he said. “We are here. You are here. Everyone is here. We are all Ukraine.”