North Korean soldiers fighting for Russia were given fake military documents with Russian names and birthplaces, the Ukrainian military said, amid claims from Kyiv that Russia is trying to conceal the presence of foreign fighters on the battlefield.

Vladimir Putin was dealt a blow with Ukraine's incursion into Russia's Kursk oblast but his forces ended the year with momentum in the Donbas.

Ukraine's membership of NATO is "achievable", but Kyiv will have to fight to persuade allies to make it happen, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told Ukrainian diplomats in a speech on Sunday. Ukraine has repeatedly urged NATO to invite Kyiv to become a member.

While Russia is mass-producing machinery at state-owned industries, Ukraine has spawned hundreds of entrepreneur-led defense startups by slashing regulation and cutting taxes.

The Ukrainian energy network has been so battered by Russian attacks that officials are seeking out new options to prevent a crisis, like renting floating power plants and scavenging scrapped ones from the region.

Lithuania’s national opera house had stopped showing Tchaikovsky’s 1892 masterpiece in solidarity with Ukraine over the war with Russia. Then a new minister expressed fondness for the Russian composer,

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has said that European leaders must acknowledge the need to change their strategy regarding Ukraine.

Associated Press journalists have been covering these conflicts since they began. Now, as 2024 ends and a new year begins, we asked two veteran AP reporters — Josef Federman in Jerusalem and Samya Kullab in Kyiv — to talk about what they saw the past year and what struck them. Here are their accounts:

Russia's ballistic missile attack on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, killed at least one person; a Ukrainian attack on Russian border town killed six, officials say.

Ukrainian pensioner Oleksandr Sopov barely reacts to the boom of artillery outside Pokrovsk, the eastern city where fierce battles are raging between Russian and Ukrainian forces.