| A Russian attack against Ukraine's energy system and some cities with cruise and ballistic missiles plus drones on Wednesday prompted the strong reaction of Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who described it as an “inhuman” Christmas Day assault. US President Joe Biden also intervened, saying he had asked the Defence Department to proceed with a new surge of military aid to Kyiv.
On the same day, Pope Francis called for talks to end Ukraine war. Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo announced an investigation into an undersea power cable outage on the Estlink 2 line connecting Finland and Estonia on Christmas day, reducing the cable's capacity from 1,016 MW to 358 MW. Despite the disruption, Finland's electricity supply remained unaffected. Finnish authorities are on high alert for potential sabotage, although technical malfunctions or accidents could also be the cause. The outage happened as 658 MW of electricity flowed from Finland to Estonia. The reason for the interruption of the connection is not yet known, however, several people in X and BlueSky services have pointed out that a Hong Kon-flagged cargo ship was near the cable at the time of the interruption. Marine Traffic shows that the Xin Xin Tian 2 vessel, en route from St. Petersburg to Alexandria, was near the cable at 12:26. According to a Fingrid press release, Estlink 2 disconnected from the grid at exactly 12:26. A similar incident occurred last month when a Chinese boat was spotted around two undersea severed cables between Sweden, Finland and Lithuania. The ship, called Yi Peng, was then immobilised by the Danish military. There was more trouble at sea this week when a Russian cargo ship ran into trouble and sank in the Mediterranean Sea. It was later shook by three explosions in what the vessel’s owner called “an act of terrorism”, according to Russian state media. Meanwhile, China announced on Wednesday that it would extend its anti-dumping probe into brandy imported from the EU due to the case's “complexity”, Afp reported. In Berlin, pressure is mounting on Olaf Scholz’s government to provide an explanation about Magdeburg’s Christmas market attack as press reports suggest that the attacker – a Saudi man – had previously made threats in a post on X. “It's very likely that I will die this year to bring justice”, the Saudi man posted, raising questions on whether the German interior ministry had spotted the threat. However, according to a poll conducted after the attack by the INSA Institute on behalf of the Bild newspaper, the far-right AfD does not gain politically from the deadly incident. The political parties’ popularity remains almost the same: CDU/CSU maintains its clear lead with 31% (-0.5), and AfD appears to have stabilised in second place with 19.5% and without any change in its percentages. In the Western Balkans, lawmakers in Bosnia's Serb Republic regional parliament ordered Serb representatives in state institutions on Wednesday to block decision-making and law changes needed for Bosnia and Herzegovina's integration into the EU. Both the US and the EU reacted strongly to the move, seen as a reaction to the trial of the region's leader, pro-Russian Milorad Dodik, who is being prosecuted in Bosnia's state court for failing to comply with decisions made by the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Christian Schmidt. In Albania, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s pricy migrant reception and processing centres are now being used to house stray dogs after a string of judicial rulings cast doubt on the future of the initiative. The centres were initially designed to house some 3,000 migrants at any time while their asylum applications were processed. But journalists report that they are supervised by a skeleton staff (themselves accommodated in nearby 5-star hotels) who have taken it upon themselves to feed and care for local strays, giving them shelter from the brutal winter weather. While Meloni remains popular at home, the news that taxpayers' money is being spent on luxury accommodations for humans and dog biscuits for the four-legged locals might not go down too well. Last but not least, the Serbian Foreign Ministry has banned Kosovo Interior Minister Xhelal Zvecla from visiting the Presheva Valley, a predominantly ethnic Albanian area in the south of Serbia. The refusal to allow him to enter to visit the area was given on the grounds that, “the positions and actions of Minister Svecla were highlighted, which, according to the Government of Serbia, are directed against the Serbian community in the Republic of Kosovo as well as against normalisation, peace and stability.” Albanians in Presheva have been subject to administrative cleansing by the Serbian government, are not allowed to fly their flag, and struggle to get access to vital information in their own language, all rights provided to Serbs in Kosovo. | 
