Ukraine launched an overnight strike deep inside Russia that set fire to an oil depot in the city of Engels that serves an air base for Russian nuclear bomber planes, the Ukrainian military said yesterday.

Russia said yesterday that Ukraine had launched a counter-attack in the Kursk region, an area of western Russia from which Russian troops have been trying to eject Ukrainian forces for the past five months.

Gunmen ambushed a Pakistan convoy travelling to bring aid to a region besieged by sectarian fighting yesterday, local government said, wounding several officials despite a ceasefire announced three days ago.

Russia launched a barrage of drones in an overnight attack on Ukraine, killing two civilians and injuring four others in the Kyiv region, the military and regional officials said yesterday.

British researchers have unearthed some 200 dinosaur footprints dating back 166 million years in a find believed to be biggest in the UK.

Seven out of 10 UK family doctors are worn out and suffering from “compassion fatigue”, finding it hard to empathise with their patients, a poll published Thursday said.

Five people died across Germany and a police officer was seriously injured from accidents linked to the powerful fireworks Germans traditionally set off to celebrate the new year, police said in a preliminary count.

Twenty migrants were missing Tuesday off the coast of Italy’s Lampedusa in a shipwreck in which seven people, including an eight-year-old Syrian child, were rescued, news media reported.

President Vladimir Putin told Russians in a New Year address that the country would move forward with confidence in 2025.

Former England soccer boss Gareth Southgate, London Mayor Sadiq Khan and Paris Olympics gold medallist Keely Hodgkinson were among the hundreds named in King Charles's New Year honours list published on Monday

Germany’s government said yesterday US billionaire tech baron Elon Musk is trying to sway February elections by praising the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), a move strongly rejected by major parties.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said yesterday that a passenger plane that crashed last week, killing 38 people, had been damaged by shooting from the ground in Russia, and he said some in Russia had lied about the cause of the disaster.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier yesterday dissolved parliament and confirmed the expected date for the early general election prompted by the collapse of Olaf Scholz’s government last month.

Pope Francis yesterday called for “arms to be silenced” around the world in his Christmas address, appealing for peace in the Middle East, Ukraine and Sudan as he denounced the “extremely grave” humanitarian situation in Gaza.

Britain’s economy failed to grow during the first three months of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s new government, official figures showed on Monday, adding to signs of a slowdown that has cast a shadow over his time in office so far.

Russia yesterday said it had captured the village of Storozheve in eastern Ukraine, near the town of Velyka Novosilka which its troops is apparently trying to encircle.

Kyiv yesterday staged a major drone attack on the Russian city of  Kazan, 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) from the frontier, as Moscow’s  troops captured a new frontline village in eastern Ukraine.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz yesterday condemned the “terrible, insane” car-ramming attack on a crowded Christmas market that killed five people and injured more than 200.

At least two people were killed, one of them a young child, and 68 injured

Spanish rescuers yesterday said four sub-Saharan African migrants died attempting to reach the Canary Islands, the latest tragedy in a record year of irregular arrivals in the Atlantic archipelago.