Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he held talks with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, during which they discussed strengthening defense cooperation between Kyiv and London.
Zelensky said - in a tweet on Twitter - that he agreed with Sunak to intensify efforts to approach victory, which has become closer this year, as he put it, stressing that the two parties have specific decisions in this regard.
This comes at a time when a number of Russian nationalists and lawmakers demanded the punishment of leaders they accused of ignoring the risks, in light of the escalation of anger over the killing of dozens of soldiers in one of the bloodiest strikes during the Russian war on Ukraine.
In a rare statement on the death toll, the Russian Defense Ministry said that 63 soldiers were killed on New Year's Eve in an explosion that destroyed a temporary barracks at a vocational school in Makevka, near the Russian-controlled Donetsk regional capital.
Russian critics said that the soldiers were staying next to an ammunition depot - at the site that the Russian Defense Ministry said - which was hit by 4 missiles fired from US-made HIMARS launchers.
Television footage showed a huge building reduced to rubble, while cranes and bulldozers were moving through concrete debris several feet deep.
On the other hand, estimates by Kyiv and some Russian nationalist bloggers put the death toll in the hundreds, but pro-Russian officials say that these estimates are exaggerated.
The Russian RIA Novosti news agency also reported that several Russian cities witnessed marches to commemorate the dead, including Samara (the center of the country), to which some of them belong, and mourners laid flowers in the center of the city.
Hundreds dead
On the ground, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced the elimination of hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers and 130 foreign mercenaries during the military operations carried out by the Russian army on Monday.
The ministry's spokesman, Igor Konashenkov, said that his country's forces bombed the positions of the Ukrainian forces in the railway area in the city of Druzhkovo, Donetsk, and killed about 120 Ukrainian soldiers.
On the other hand, the governor of the Ukrainian Luhansk region, Sergey Gaidai, announced that the Ukrainian forces had taken control of the road linking the cities of Svatova and Kremina in the Luhansk province.
Gaidai added that the Russian forces began to strengthen their fortifications in the city of Starobelsk after the Ukrainian army approached, and the Ukrainian military leadership in Luhansk broadcasted pictures of operations it had carried out against the Russian forces, and said that the initiative in the province was in the hands of its forces.