Europe

BELGRADE, December 31. /TASS/: Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic thanked his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin for greetings on the upcoming New Year holidays, according to the Serbian leader’s interview with the Prva TV channel.

"Yes, he [Russian President Vladimir Putin] congratulated me, tomorrow Russian envoy to Serbia Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko will pass these greetings to me. He insisted that he would give it to me before the end of this year. Thanks to him [the Russian president] for the greetings," Vucic said.

MOSCOW, December 31. /TASS/: The West has been systematically deceiving Russia since the end of the Cold War in order to weaken it geopolitically, Leonid Slutsky, Chairman of the Russian State Duma Committee on Foreign Affairs, said, comme nting on former French President Francois Hollande's statement about the Minsk agreements being an attempt to buy Kiev some time.

LUGANSK, December 31. /TASS/: Ukrainian troops are continuing attempts to break through the line of engagement but Russian forces have been successfully deflecting them, acting head of the LPR Leonid Pasechnik said in an interview with TASS on Saturday.

MOSCOW, December 31. /TASS/: Remarks by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and ex-French President Francois Hollande that the Minsk Agreements served to win time for Kiev to prepare for war are "documented betrayal," Deputy Speaker of the Federation Council Konstantin Kosachev said on Saturday.

MOSCOW, December 31. /TASS/: The price of gas in Europe fell by 48% in December 2022 versus the previous month to around $845 per 1,000 cubic meters, according to data provided by London’s ICE on January and February futures contracts and TASS’ calculations.

The decrease was triggered by the abnormally warm weather in the region and a large amount of gas supplies in storage facilities.

KYIV, Dec 31 (Reuters) - Russia fired more than 20 cruise missiles at targets in Ukraine on Saturday, killing at least one person in the capital Kyiv and injuring more than a dozen in what one official described as "terror on New Year's Eve".

Moscow's second major missile attack in three days badly damaged a hotel south of Kyiv's centre and a residential building in another district. A Japanese journalist was among the wounded and taken to hospital, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.

Dec 31 (Reuters) - Following are reactions to the death of former Pope Benedict, who was the first pontiff in 600 years to resign from the post rather than rule for life:

GERMAN CHANCELLOR OLAF SCHOLZ ON TWITTER:

"As a "German" #Pope, #BenedictXVI was a special church leader for many, not only in this country. The world is losing a formative figure of the Catholic Church, a forthright personality and a clever theologian. My thoughts are with Pope Francis."

MARKUS SOEDER, PREMIER OF BENEDICT'S HOME STATE OF BAVARIA:

Dec 31 (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin devoted his annual New Year's address on Saturday to rallying the Russian people behind his troops fighting in Ukraine and pledging victory over Ukrainian "neo-Nazis" and a West supposedly intent on "destroying Russia".

In a stern and combative recorded video message, broadcast on national television, Putin cast the war - which he calls a "special military operation" - as a near-existential fight for the future of Russia.

BERLIN, Dec. 30 (Xinhua) -- Germany recorded its hottest year in 2022 with an annual mean temperature of 10.5 degrees Celsius, the National Meteorological Service (DWD) said on Friday.

The country saw an "exceptional weather year," the DWD said. Temperatures were 2.3 degrees Celsius above the value of the internationally valid reference period (1961-1990), and were higher than in 2018, the previous record holder.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — For millions of Ukrainians, many of them under Russian bombardment and grappling with power and water shortages, New Year’s celebrations will be muted as Russia’s 10-month war rumbles on with no end in sight.

But for some families, it is a chance to reunite, however briefly, after months apart.

At Kyiv’s central railway station on Saturday morning, Mykyta, still in his uniform, gripped a bouquet of pink roses tightly as he waited on platform 9 for his wife Valeriia to arrive from Poland. He hadn’t seen her in six months.