Russia attacked Kyiv and other parts of Ukraine with hundreds of missiles and drones on Saturday, ahead of what President Volodymyr Zelensky said would be a crucial meeting with US President Donald Trump to work out a plan to end nearly four years of war.

Zelensky cast the vast overnight attack, which he said involved about 500 drones and 40 missiles and which knocked out power and heat in parts of the capital, as Russia’s response to the ongoing peace efforts brokered by Washington.

The Ukrainian leader has said Sunday’s talks in Florida would focus on security guarantees and territorial control once fighting ends in Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War Two, started by Russia’s 2022 invasion of its smaller neighbor.

The attack continued throughout the morning, with a nearly 10-hour air raid alert for the capital. Authorities said two people were killed in Kyiv and the surrounding region, while at least 46 people were wounded, including two children.

“Today, Russia demonstrated how it responds to peaceful negotiations between Ukraine and the United States to end Russia’s war against Ukraine,” Zelensky told reporters.

In Russia, air defense forces shot down eight drones headed for Moscow, the city’s mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on Saturday.

THOUSANDS OF HOMES WITHOUT HEAT

Explosions echoed across Kyiv from the early hours on Saturday as Ukraine’s air defense units went into action. The air force said Russian drones were targeting the capital and regions in the northeast and south.

State grid operator Ukrenergo said energy facilities across Ukraine were struck, and emergency power cuts had been implemented across the capital.

DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, said the attack had left more than a million households in and around Kyiv without power, 750,000 of which remained disconnected by the afternoon.

Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said over 40% of residential buildings in Kyiv were left without heat as temperatures hovered around 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit) on Saturday.

TERRITORIAL CONTROL: A DIPLOMATIC STUMBLING BLOCK

On the way to meeting Trump in Florida, Zelensky stopped in Canada’s Halifax to meet Prime Minister Mark Carney, after which they planned to hold a call with European leaders.

In a brief statement with Zelenskiy by his side, Carney noted that peace “requires a willing Russia.”

“The barbarism that we saw overnight — the attack on Kyiv — shows just how important it is that we stand with Ukraine in this difficult time,” he said, announcing 2.5 billion Canadian dollars ($1.83 billion) in additional economic aid to Ukraine.

Territory and the future of the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant remain the main diplomatic stumbling blocks, though Zelensky told journalists in Kyiv on Friday that a 20-point draft document – the cornerstone of a US push to clinch a peace deal – is 90% complete.

He said the shape of U.S. security guarantees was crucial, and these would depend on Trump, and “what he is ready to give, when he is ready to give it, and for how long.”

Zelensky told Axios earlier this week that the US had offered a 15-year deal on security guarantees, subject to renewal, but Kyiv wanted a longer agreement with legally binding provisions to guard against further Russian aggression.

Trump said the United States was the driving force behind the process.

“He doesn’t have anything until I approve it,” Trump told Politico. “So we’ll see what he’s got.”

Trump said he believed Sunday’s meeting would go well. He also said he expected to speak with Putin “soon, as much as I want.”

FATE OF DONETSK IS KEY

Moscow is demanding that Ukraine withdraw from a large, densely-urbanized chunk of the eastern region of Donetsk that Russian troops have failed to occupy in nearly four years of war. Kyiv wants the fighting halted at the current lines.

Russia has been grinding slowly forwards throughout 2025 at the cost of significant casualties on the drone-infested battlefield.

On Saturday, both sides issued conflicting claims about two frontline towns: Myrnohrad in the east and Huliaipole in the south. Moscow claimed to have captured both, while Kyiv said it had beaten back Russian assaults there.

Under a US compromise, a free economic zone would be set up if Ukrainian troops pull back from parts of the Donetsk region, though details have yet to be worked out.

Axios quoted Zelensky as saying that if he is not able to push the US to back Ukraine’s position on the land issue, he was willing to put the 20-point plan to a referendum – as long as Russia agrees to a 60-day ceasefire allowing Ukraine to prepare for and hold the vote.

On Saturday, Zelensky said it was not possible to have such a referendum while Russia was bombarding Ukrainian cities.

He also suggested that he would be ready for “dialogue” with the people of Ukraine if they disagreed with points of the plan.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Kyiv’s version of the 20-point plan differed from what Russia had been discussing with the US, according to the Interfax-Russia news agency.

But he expressed optimism that matters had reached a “turning point” in the search for a settlement.

($1 = 1.3671 Canadian dollars)

i24 News – In recent days, Saudi Arabia has taken notable steps that suggest a recalibration of its relationship with one of its key local partners in southern Yemen: the Southern Transitional Council (STC). The developments come at a time when Washington and regional actors continue to closely monitor stability in southern Yemen, a region critical to Red Sea security and regional trade routes.

The most significant move was a Saudi airstrike targeting a site linked to STC-affiliated forces in Hadramawt, eastern Yemen. While official confirmation remains limited, the strike has drawn attention to shifting dynamics between Riyadh and southern Yemeni actors.

To understand the implications of this development, it is important to clarify who the main actors are.

The Southern Transitional Council is a political and military body that enjoys strong popular support in large parts of southern Yemen. It advocates for the restoration of an independent South Yemen, which existed as a separate state until unification with North Yemen in 1990. Since its emergence in 2017, the STC has become a dominant force on the ground, maintaining effective security and military forces, particularly in Aden and along the southern coast.

Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, leads the Arab coalition backing Yemen’s internationally recognized government. That government, which operates largely from outside the country, relies heavily on regional and international support and has struggled to assert full authority on the ground. Riyadh approaches Yemen primarily through the lens of regional security, border stability, and preventing further fragmentation that could fuel prolonged conflict.

While Saudi Arabia has worked with the STC at various stages of the war, it has not granted the group unrestricted freedom to expand its influence across all southern regions. This is especially true in eastern governorates such as Hadramawt and Al-Mahra, which are strategically sensitive for Saudi Arabia due to their geography, border proximity, and relevance to regional security and trade routes.

Against this backdrop, the recent airstrike appears less about achieving a tactical military objective and more about sending a political signal. The message seems to be that Riyadh intends to retain primary control over the eastern Yemen file and limit unilateral moves by the STC that could alter the balance of power without Saudi coordination.

Recent Saudi media commentary and political messaging have reinforced this interpretation, emphasizing the need to prevent actions that could complicate broader regional arrangements at a time when Saudi Arabia is seeking to stabilize its Yemen policy and focus on wider strategic priorities.

For the STC, the signal is clear: southern aspirations may be tolerated within defined limits, but eastern Yemen remains a red line where Saudi Arabia expects coordination rather than faits accomplis. For Riyadh, the episode reflects a strategy of calibrated pressure—seeking influence and containment rather than open confrontation with a key southern actor.

As reactions continue to unfold, the episode highlights a central reality of Yemen’s conflict: local power on the ground matters, but the ultimate boundaries are often set by regional actors shaping the pace and direction of political change.

This fall, I read a story set in Prague during World War II in which three boys, two of whom escaped from a concentration camp, watch as armed Czechs consider forcing two Germans to jump out an apartment window to certain death — but decide to hand them over to authorities instead.

One of the three boys then “had an unquestionable feeling that what he had just experienced had been justice.” At first, this perhaps reads as a bit strange. Why would a Czech boy think letting Germans go, after they occupied his city and took over his life — not to mention imprisoned and tortured members of his community in concentration camps — constitutes justice? Yet all the same, the boy “felt satisfaction that those two people, whom he’d seen for the first time in his life, and probably for the last, hadn’t jumped. That they didn’t have to jump.”

Justice, in this story, isn’t doing to your enemy what he’d done to you. It’s having the opportunity to do so, and instead choosing not to become your enemy.

That story, “Black Lion,” was written by the Czech Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor Arnošt Lustig, who would have been 99 this December. (He passed away in 2011). Lustig drew on the unthinkable series of events he was forced to endure — being forced into the Nazi ghetto of Theresienstadt at the age of 15 and then sent to Auschwitz and Buchenwald — and made it into art. And while his novels, short stories and films look unflinchingly at the worst of humanity, they always treat their characters humanely.

This year, we have lurched from crisis to crisis, at home and abroad, while many in power around the world demonstrate a capacity for cruelty matched only by their cynicism. So, as we come to 2025’s end, I have found myself thinking of “Black Lion,” and Lustig’s work more generally. What does it mean, I’ve wondered, to stare into the darkest void of inhumanity and pronounce, as Lustig did, that life is still a miracle?

As Lustig’s daughter, Eva Lustigová, told me, “The leitmotif in all of his work is: what can we do in a world where people kill one another? That was the thematic question.”

‘That darkness never breaks him’

Lustig’s works are largely set during or immediately after the Holocaust. His protagonists are often Czech or other Central Eastern European Jews; and the stories and books often feature children and teenagers.

The short story “The Last Day of the Fire” zooms in on one old man and his grandson during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; the novel Dita Saxová is about an 18-year-old concentration camp survivor making her way in postwar Prague, balancing the hell from which she just emerged with considerations like which boy to date; The Unloved: From the Diary of Perla S., is about a 17-year-old in Theresienstadt working as a prostitute; Darkness Casts No Shadow, the novella that became the (beautiful and wrenching) film Diamonds of the Night, is about two boys trying to escape a train carrying them to a camp.

The choice to so often focus on the very young does two things.

First, it makes the juxtaposition between darkness and light that much starker. The worst things imaginable are happening to people who should be out playing or daydreaming or shuffling their schoolbooks. Yet they still, in Lustig’s works, hold onto their humanity, even as their innocence is stolen from them.

As Dalibor Rohac, a senior fellow focused on European affairs at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote me in an email: “Lustig writes about a lot of very dark stuff…but somehow that darkness never breaks him.”

But second, Lustig’s focus on the young gives his work, as specific as it is, a kind of universal urgency. Read a novel about teenagers running from transports in Central Europe and how their neighbors treat them — and then go and read the news about ICE raids and schoolchildren here in the United States. The point isn’t that the situations are one to one — they never are — but that, as people, we all grapple with similar challenges: What it means to be human; what we owe to our own and other people’s children; how to refuse cynicism when it seems like moral depravity is a prerequisite for holding actual power.

“I write about people under pressure, I write about tests that people are not ready for and which they did not expect,” Lustig said in 2002.

We are in an era of such tests. It sometimes feels like I spent the past year talking about crises: of liberal democracy, of American and Jewish identities, of human rights. So many are in so much pain; so many worry that 2026 will represent a continuation, or worsening, of tests we have no idea how to meet.

Perhaps fittingly, 2026 is also the centenary of Lustig’s birth. The Arnošt Lustig Foundation is preparing a year-long festival in 10 countries over four continents. One goal, Lustigová said, is to promote the idea, which so often appears in Lustig’s work, that humanism “doesn’t need to be imported or exported. It just needs to be cultivated.”

“The answer is, yes, we can keep our humanity,” she added. “We decide that ourselves, even under the harshest of circumstances. It’s a choice to be able to live with our conscience and keep our human dignity.”

“You can put that into Gaza, Israel, Sudan, Tanzania. You can put it anywhere.”

Listening to her, I thought again of what it means to live in pursuit of dignity and justice at a moment when that can feel at best foolish and at worst impossible — and of “Black Lion,” and the stories that can help to show us how.

The post The Holocaust survivor writer who can help us through this ominous era appeared first on The Forward.