“There are no holidays for the enemy,” Andrii Yermak, the head of the Ukrainian president’s office, wrote on social media, commenting on the Kherson attack. “They do not exist for us as long as the enemy kills our people and remains on our land.”
Four persons were murdered by Russian shelling on Sunday in the Kherson region of southern Ukraine. Among them were an 87-year-old man and his 81-year-old wife, who perished after their apartment building was struck.
According to Oleksandr Prokudin, the commander of the regional military administration, the barrage caused nine more injuries, including one to a 15-year-old, set fire to a local gas pipeline, and caused fires in residences and a private medical center.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed legislation in July that moved the public Christmas Day holiday to December 25. However, one of the two rival Orthodox church organizations in Ukraine continues to observe the Julian calendar’s January date. On December 24, on Christmas Eve, Zelenskyy gave a speech to the country via video shot in front of the brightly lighted St. Sophia Cathedral in the city of Kiev.
In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a small number of Orthodox Ukrainians celebrated Christmas on December 25 of last year. On January 7, the Russian Orthodox Church commemorates the birth of Jesus.
On January 7 of this year, the church at the Monastery of the Caves, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Kyiv, celebrated Christmas.
“Today, this is our common goal, our common dream. And this is precisely what our common prayer is for today. For our freedom. For our victory. For our Ukraine,” Zelenskyy averred.
There were other areas in Ukraine targeted on Sunday besides Kherson. The Ukrainian air force said that during the course of the night, Russian forces carried out fifteen drone attacks, resulting in the destruction of fourteen Iranian-made Shahed drones over the districts of Mykolaiv, Kirovohrad, Zaporizhzhya, Dnipropetrovsk, and Khmelnytskyi.
According to Governor Oleh Syniehubov, two persons were hurt when Russian bombardment of 20 towns and villages in the Kharkiv region of northern Ukraine occurred.
