Ukraine celebrates Christmas on December 25 for the first time amid Russian shelling

Ukraine has been hit with Russian shelling as many of it's Orthodox Christians get ready to celebrate Christmas on 25 December, for the first time this year.

Ukraine has traditionally used the Julian calendar, also used by Russia, where Christmas, the birth of Jesus, falls on January 7.

However, some Orthodox Ukrainians observed Christmas in December last year in response to Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

It came as Russian shelling in southern Ukraine’s Kherson region killed four people on Christmas Eve, including an 87-year-old man and his 81-year-old wife - who died after a strike on their apartment building.

The barrage injured nine other people, including a 15-year-old, sparked fires in homes and at a private medical facility, and set a local gas pipeline alight, the head of the regional military administration, Oleksandr Prokudin said.

“There are no holidays for the enemy,” Andrii Yermak, the head of the Ukrainian president’s office, wrote on social media, commenting on the Kherson attack.

"They do not exist for us as long as the enemy kills our people and remains on our land.”

Kherson was not the only region of Ukraine to come under attack on Sunday.

Russian forces launched 15 drone strikes overnight, and 14 of the Iranian-made Shahed drones were destroyed over the Mykolaiv, Kirovohrad, Zaporizhzhya, Dnipropetrovsk, and Khmelnytskyi regions, the Ukrainian air force reported.

Meanwhile, two people were wounded during the Russian shelling of 20 towns and villages across northern Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, Govenor Oleh Syniehubov said.

In Russia, a man was injured in the Bryansk region after a village close to the Ukrainian border came under fire, the region’s governor, Alexander Bogomaz said.

How has Christmas changed in Ukraine?

The Russian Orthodox Church observes the birth of Jesus on January 7, something that Ukrainians had followed until this year.

The cathedral in the Monastery of the Caves, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Kyiv, held its Christmas celebration on January 7 earlier this year, but the service was held in the Ukrainian language for the first time in the 31 years of Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union.

However, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed legislation in July moving the public Christmas Day holiday to December 25 - although one of Ukraine’s two competing Orthodox church organisation's is sticking with the January date dictated by the Julian calendar.

To mark Christmas Eve on December 24, Zelenskyy addressed the nation in a video filmed in front of the floodlit St Sophia Cathedral in central Kyiv.

He reassured Ukrainians fighting against Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country that “step by step, day by day, the darkness is losing.”

“Today, this is our common goal, our common dream. And this is precisely what our common prayer is for today.

"For our freedom. For our victory. For our Ukraine," Zelenskyy added.

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