What did 20 December 2024 show about the war's two fronts?
A look back at a day of missile strikes in Ukraine and Russia, and a British proposal to send military advisers to train Ukrainian forces.
What did 20 December 2024 reveal about the state of the war? The day brought strikes in both directions and, a day after it was announced, a British proposal that pointed to a longer horizon for Ukraine's military preparation.
Russian missile strikes hit civilian infrastructure in Kryvyi Rih and Kyiv on 20 December 2024. At least one person was killed and eight others were injured. Kryvyi Rih had already been subjected to a series of artillery attacks and air raids during the war, and the strikes on that day added to that record.
On the Russian side of the border, a Ukrainian missile strike killed six people and injured ten others in Rylsk, in Kursk Oblast, according to the acting Kursk Oblast governor, Alexander Khinshtein. Russia said it would raise the strike at the United Nations Security Council. The incident took place in the context of the Kursk offensive that began in 2024.
A British proposal on training
On 19 December 2024, the British defence secretary, John Healey, announced a proposal to send military advisers to train Ukrainian forces. It was a statement about support for the Ukrainian army rather than a battlefield event, and it sat alongside the continuing British assistance to Ukraine that had run through Conservative and Labour governments alike since the full-scale invasion began on 24 February 2022.
What the day set side by side
Taken together, the events of 20 December 2024 and the preceding day show three separate tracks. The first was the continued Russian targeting of cities far from the front, in Kyiv and Kryvyi Rih. The second was the Ukrainian strike inside Russia, which Moscow chose to take to a multilateral forum. The third was the effort by a major partner to deepen the training of Ukrainian troops.
The Security Council announcement is the most concrete diplomatic step among them: Russia signalled that it would frame the Rylsk casualties as an international issue. For Ukraine's government, the day underlined that civilian infrastructure remained under fire while partners continued to discuss how to prepare its forces. How those threads developed is a separate story; on 20 December 2024 they simply ran in parallel.
