CRANS-MONTANA, Switzerland, Jan 5 (Reuters) – Pressure was building for answers on Monday from the investigation into a New Year bar fire in a Swiss ski resort that killed 40 people, after authorities said they had now identified all the victims, most of whom were teenagers.
The Alpine getaway of Crans-Montana in the canton of Valais united in mourning on Sunday with condolences coming in from leaders ranging from Pope Leo to Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Prosecutors said the fire that spread rapidly in the early hours of January 1 was likely caused by sparkling candles igniting the ceiling of the bar’s basement.
Authorities are investigating the two people who ran the bar on suspicion of crimes including homicide by negligence. On Sunday, police said circumstances did not currently merit them being put under arrest and they did not see a flight risk.
On Monday morning, Swiss newspaper Blick said anger over the case was growing.
“Why are the couple running the bar free?” the paper said on its front page, pasted over a photo of mourners and media gathered around the huge pile of flowers left in front of the “Le Constellation” bar.
The youngest victims of the blaze, which also injured well over 100 people, were only 14 years old, and the dead were from all around Europe, including several from France and Italy. Swiss authorities have not named the victims.
Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini said in a social media post that “in civilized Switzerland, the prison gates will have to open for quite a few people”.
Salvini said there had been a failure to ensure the bar’s basement was safe, questioning the emergency systems and whether there had been enough inspections.
Aika Chappaz, a local resident who took part in a silent procession through the town on Sunday, said justice must be done for the sake of future generations.
“It’s crucial that such a tragedy never happens again. And the investigation must be thorough, because it’s so unbelievable,” she said.
Tages-Anzeiger, another leading Swiss newspaper, said questions must be answered about the age checks at the bar, the soundproofing material used in the basement and the standards governing use of the so-called fountain candles.
One of the bar’s two operators, Jacques Moretti, told Swiss media that Le Constellation had been checked three times in 10 years and that everything was done according to the rules.
Valais authorities say investigators were checking if the bar had undergone its annual building inspections, but that the town had not raised concerns or reported defects to the canton.
(Reporting by Dave Graham and Cecile Mantovani; Editing by Alex Richardson)
PARIS, Jan 5 (Reuters) – The opening of France’s Louvre museum in Paris was delayed until 0900 GMT on Monday as staff was meeting to decide whether to resume a strike started in December over pay and working conditions, museum employees said.
Staff on December 19 had voted to call off the strike until January 5.
(Reporting by Sarah Meyssonnier, Dominique Vidalon; Editing by Benoit Van Overstraeten)
BEIJING, Jan 5 (Reuters) – China is ready to strengthen strategic communication with Ireland and expand practical cooperation, while aiming to achieve mutually beneficial results, Chinese President Xi Jinping told Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin on Monday.
Xi did not elaborate on what cooperation China was interested to further in his opening remarks at their meeting held at the Great Hall of the People, but he emphasised mutual respect and achieving win-win outcomes as “valuable experiences for the long-term, stable development of China-Ireland ties”.
Martin, the first Irish Taoiseach to visit Beijing in 14 years, said that Ireland recognises China’s “indispensable role” in the world, underlining China’s peacekeeping efforts, and stressed Ireland’s stance on open trade.
(Reporting by Liz Lee; Editing by Christian Schmollinger)
ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE, Jan 4 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump said he did not believe that an alleged Ukrainian strike on President Vladimir Putin’s residence took place as claimed by Russia.
“I don’t believe that strike happened,” Trump told reporters on Sunday aboard Air Force One en route back to Washington, D.C., from Florida. “There is something that happened fairly nearby, but had nothing to do with this.”
Moscow accused Kyiv on Monday of trying to strike a residence of Putin in Russia’s northern Novgorod region with 91 long-range attack drones, and said Russia would review its negotiating position in ongoing talks with the U.S. on ending the Ukraine war.
Ukraine and Western countries have disputed Russia’s account of the alleged attempted strike.
(Reporting by Gram Slattery aboard Air Force One and Lawrence Delevingne in Boston; Editing by Christian Schmollinger)
MOSCOW, Jan 4 (Reuters) – Russia’s Security Council deputy chairman Dmitry Medvedev and a senior lawmaker said over the weekend that U.S. President Donald Trump’s actions in Venezuela were unlawful and destabilising, while portraying them as a blunt assertion of U.S. interests.
The comments followed Trump’s statement that the United States struck Venezuela and that Maduro and his wife were captured and taken out of the country, prompting international reaction and calls for urgent UN discussions.
Medvedev told TASS on Sunday that Trump’s behaviour was illegal but internally coherent because it pursued U.S. interests.
“It must be acknowledged that, despite the obvious unlawfulness of Trump’s behaviour, one cannot deny a certain consistency in his actions. He and his team defend their country’s national interests quite harshly,” Medvedev was quoted as saying.
Medvedev said Latin America was viewed as the United States’ “backyard” and suggested Trump was seeking leverage over Venezuela’s oil supplies.
“Uncle Sam’s main motivation has always been simple: other people’s supplies,” Medvedev said, according to TASS.
He added that if such an operation were carried out against a stronger country, it would be seen as an act of war.
Alexei Pushkov, a Russian senator who chairs a Federation Council commission on information policy, said the operation and Trump’s rhetoric might prove less effective than their dramatic impact.
“One cannot deny that Trump’s actions and especially his statements are striking. Their effectiveness is another matter,” Pushkov said on the Telegram messaging app.
He compared the episode to what he called premature U.S. declarations of victory in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, arguing that initial “triumphs” later turned into defeat or prolonged crises.
Pushkov said the United States, by attacking Venezuela and seizing its president, had violated norms and “alarmed the whole world,” returning it to “the wild imperialism of the 19th century” and reviving a Wild West right to act at will in the Western Hemisphere.
“But what will the final result be? Will this ‘triumph’ not turn into a catastrophe?” he said.
Russia has long maintained close ties with Venezuela, spanning energy cooperation, military links and high-level political contacts, and Moscow has backed Caracas diplomatically for years as both countries seek to deepen trade and investment.
(Reporting and writing by Vladimir Soldatkin and Lidia Kelly; Editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Stephen Coates)
VILNIUS, Jan 4 (Reuters) – An optical cable belonging to a private company has been damaged in the Baltic Sea, Latvia’s Prime Minister Evika Silina said in a statement on Sunday, adding that the circumstances of the incident were under investigation.
The cable connects Lithuania and Latvia, and it was not immediately clear what had caused the incident, Lithuania’s National Crisis Management Centre said in a separate statement.
The Baltic Sea region is on high alert after a string of power cable, telecom link and gas pipeline outages since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and the NATO military alliance has boosted its presence with frigates, aircraft and naval drones.
The latest incident is made public five days after Finnish police seized a cargo vessel en route from Russia to Israel on suspicion of sabotaging an undersea telecoms cable running from Helsinki across the Gulf of Finland to Estonia.
(Reporting by Andrius Sytas, editing by Terje Solsvik and Gwladys Fouche)
CRANS-MONTANA, Switzerland, Jan 4 (Reuters) – Hundreds of people silently filed through the frosty streets of the Swiss ski resort of Crans-Montana on Sunday to remember victims of a New Year bar fire that killed at least 40 people and injured more than a hundred others.
Following a packed church mass that spilled outdoors, the crowd slowly walked towards an impromptu shrine to the victims next to the “Le Constellation” bar that went up in flames in the early hours of January 1.
“It’s to be together with the people who are suffering, who have lost somebody in the family, children or friends,” said 76-year-old Charlotte Schumacher, a participant in the procession. “I know people who have lost their grandchildren.”
Teenagers as young as 14 or 15 years old were among the dead, and the severity of the burns suffered by the victims has made the process of identifying them difficult.
Attendees of the interconfessional church service hugged and shook hands as the prosperous Alpine town sought to pull together to process the trauma of one of the deadliest tragedies to strike modern Switzerland.
Prosecutors said the fire was likely caused by sparkling candles igniting the ceiling of its basement. Swiss authorities have put the two people who ran the bar under investigation on suspicion of crimes including homicide by negligence.
The injured and missing came from all corners of Europe and as far afield as Australia, underlining the international appeal of the picturesque resort with panoramic views of the Alps.
But most of the tally were Swiss. The toll might have been worse if emergency services had not acted so quickly, residents said.
“Within minutes you had ambulances; within minutes you had the police that did their job and they did it unbelievably well,” said Max Haus, a local business owner who witnessed the harrowing aftermath of the blaze.
As Sunday’s sombre procession reached its conclusion, applause began rippling from one end to the other as dozens of police and emergency services workers, some of them in tears, came up through the middle to be celebrated as heroes.
“It’s unimaginable what they did, what they have seen,” Bruno Huggler, the director of tourism for Crans-Montana, said of the rescue workers. “And now it’s very important to take care of them.”
(Reporting by Dave GrahamEditing by Christina Fincher)
ZURICH, Jan 4 (Reuters) – The bodies of four more people who died in the fire that killed 40 people at a bar in Switzerland on New Year’s Eve have been identified, cantonal police said.
Two Swiss women aged 24 and 22 along with two Swiss men aged 21 and 18 have been identified and their bodies have been returned to their families, Valais police said. No further information was given.
The news takes the number of identified bodies following the blaze in the ski resort of Crans-Montana to eight, after the identification of four other bodies on Saturday.
Officials are still trying to identify many of those killed in the fire at the Le Constellation bar, which has become one of Switzerland’s worst tragedies.
Some 119 people suffered injuries, including severe burns, with many transferred to burn units in hospitals around Europe. Work on identifying the dead and the injured are continuing, the police said.
Two people who ran the bar are under criminal investigation on suspicion of offences including homicide by negligence, prosecutors said on Saturday.
(Reporting by John Revill; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
FRANKFURT, Jan 3 (Reuters) – Germany’s foreign ministry on Saturday called for a political solution in Venezuela where the United States attacked and captured leader Nicolas Maduro.
“We call on all involved parties to avoid an escalation of the situation and to seek ways for a political settlement,” said a written communication obtained by Reuters after a crisis team had met at the ministry.
“International law has to be respected … Venezuelans deserve a peaceful and democratic future,” it added.
The ministry said it was in close contact with the embassy in Caracas and a travel warning had been issued.
Its note echoed statements by both the European Union’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas, who also has repeatedly said that Maduro “lacks legitimacy,” and from EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who demanded the observance of international law.
German politicians and commentators on Saturday took mixed stances, with some applauding Maduro’s removal and others condemning what they called the abandonment of the rules-based order of the post-1945 Western world.
(Reporting by Andreas Rinke and Vera Eckert; Editing by Toby Chopra)
VIENNA, Jan 3 (Reuters) – Swiss prosecutors said on Saturday they have placed under criminal investigation the two managers of a bar where a blaze on New Year’s Day killed at least 40 people.
The offences they are suspected of having committed are homicide by negligence, causing bodily harm by negligence and arson by negligence, the prosecutors’ office in the canton of Valais said in a statement.
(Reporting by Francois Murphy; editing by Jason Neely)
“Minimal” is on view at La Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection through January 19, 2025. Courtesy Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection
Minimalism emerged as both an act of resistance and a direct response to the exuberance of mass media and mass production—forces celebrated as progress that fundamentally reshaped how we relate to objects and to material reality itself. Seen from today’s vantage point, works made during the height of the movement in the 1960s and ’70s reveal a radical and strikingly timely philosophical and political interrogation of our modern sense of reality that feels particularly urgent in an era defined by the mediatization and spectacularization of the digital sphere.
Against the promise of endless availability and the relentless cycles of production, circulation and consumption—including the infinite reproducibility of the digital image—Minimalism’s artists embraced an ascetic discipline of reduction, stripping the artwork to its essential terms and events while intensifying its effects. In doing so, they underscored how an object, through restraint, can shape perception and reconfigure the very space and architecture that contain it.
“Minimal,” a major exhibition that opened at La Bourse de Commerce in October, brings together over 100 works, including a core group drawn from François Pinault’s collection, alongside international loans from the Dia Foundation in New York and other institutions. Curated by Dia director Jessica Morgan, it traces, likely for the first time, both the diversity and the global reach of the movement launched by a generation of artists who initiated a radical approach to art that later took on different forms around the world.
The exhibition unfolds as a journey that allows for multiple discoveries and rediscoveries, showcasing how artists from diverse cultural backgrounds across Asia, Europe, and North and South America similarly challenged traditional methods of art production and display. At its core is a fundamental reconsideration of the artwork’s placement in relation to the viewer and within the cyclical flow of energy and matter that underpins the cosmos itself.
Lygia Pape’s Weaving Space. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur/Pinault Collection | Courtesy Projeto Lygia Pape
The works in the show were born out of a shared attempt to stage raw encounters with matter and to engage the most primordial and authentic structures of human experience. Conceived with both conceptual and spiritual rigor, they privilege presence and perception over form, becoming experiential sites of “lived perception”—embodying an entire mode of thinking in an art object that places the physical self at the center of understanding the world.
Philosophically, Minimalist artworks foreground a mature awareness of reality as inherently interrelational, something that arises only in the encounter between object, viewer and environment. A radical manifestation of this interdependence appears in the central installations by American artist Meg Webster, which dominate the Bourse’s scenic, frescoed rotunda. Conceived and realized in collaboration with natural processes, their final form stages a tense resistance to entropy, which inevitably alters their shape and appearance over time beyond any claim to human formal control or perfection. Natural processes are embedded within these seemingly simple structures, which ultimately draw an entire ecosystem into Tadao Ando’s spare architecture. Here, the total choreography matters as much as its individual components, as Webster constructs an interior landscape at the building’s core.
Merging nature and culture, matter and energy, Webster’s process-based sculpture is infused with a prescient ecological consciousness. Poised between the elemental and the formal, between human-shaped material and natural transformation, her work prompts reflection on sustainability and our relationship to the earth—particularly resonant today as she receives long-overdue international attention through this presentation, which runs in conjunction with her year-long exhibition at Dia Beacon.
Meg Webster works at Bourse de Commerce. Photo : Florent Michel / 11h45 / Pinault Collection
If Minimalism has long been interpreted as an aesthetic reaction to the subjective overflow of Abstract Expressionism and the figuration of Pop Art, the global perspective and breadth of this exhibition make clear that the approach often extended far beyond a purely aesthetic exercise. In doing so, it prepared the conceptual ground for a substantial share of contemporary sculpture and Conceptual Art, pushing the logic of economy of means to the point of privileging the idea over its realization. This shift opened up possibilities for many contemporary artistic practices that operate beyond, or are no longer confined to, fixed traditional media.
The exhibition is organized into seven thematic sections: Light, Mono-ha, Balance, Surface, Grid, Monochrome and Materialism. The titles signal the core elements these artists investigated in their inquiry into the most radical ways of translating reality through art reduced to its most essential components. Unadorned by any pretense of figuration or narrative and detached from the biographical identity of its maker, each work functions simultaneously as proposition and question.
Underlying the pieces on view is a shared desire to situate the audience within the same perceptual field, calling for a bodily correspondence between artwork and viewer through scale and proximity. In many parts of the world, this reconceptualization of three-dimensional form and perception led to a dialogue with performance, whether through process-based making, choreographic collaboration or direct physical interaction with the work.
The exhibition naturally includes the early generation of American artists most closely associated with the movement, including Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Dan Flavin, though they do not occupy center stage, reflecting an effort to decentralize and broaden the narrative. As at Dia, the show presents artists from the 1960s who pursued a similarly radical engagement with the canvas, exploring austerity and mathematical rigor through monochrome and grid-based structures. Figures such as Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin are represented by some of the most significant works drawn from Pinault’s collection.
Particularly compelling is the dialogue established with parallel aesthetics emerging from markedly different cultural, philosophical and spiritual contexts outside the United States. Among these, the Japanese Mono-ha group offers one of the exhibition’s most resonant contributions. Pinault’s holdings include one of the most substantial collections of Mono-ha works outside Japan. Artists such as Lee Ufan, Kishio Suga, Koji Enokura, Susumu Koshimizu, Nobuo Sekine and Jiro Takamatsu foreground the interrelation of object, space and viewer, staging “things” together in their natural or industrially fabricated states. By embracing the delicate balance and tension produced by their transitory condition, these artists investigated a form of material intelligence, examining how matter retains identity even as form shifts, prioritizing material presence over sculptural expression and over any symbolic or linguistic framing.
Another compelling perspective included in the exhibition is the organic and participatory reinterpretation of geometric abstraction developed in Brazil through the Neo-Concrete movement, exemplified by Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. A capsule exhibition dedicated to Pape, “Weaving Space,” which opened a month earlier and runs concurrently, served as a prelude to “Minimal.” It traces key moments in her oeuvre, from Max Bill-inspired geometries to an increasingly organic and participatory use of abstraction, presenting works that range from her first abstract engravings to her monumental Livro Noite e Dia III (Book of Night and Day III) from 1963-76, alongside experimental films that emerged in response to Brazil’s sociopolitical context at the time. At the heart of the presentation is her poetic, full-room installation Ttéia 1, C (2003-2017), in which she literally weaves space into a new architectural structure using delicate gold threads, transforming the environment into a luminous and diaphanous site of exchange between physical presence and imagination, light and darkness.
One of her most radical works, Divisor (1968), was restaged during the show’s opening weeks. As in its original enactment in Rio de Janeiro, a hundred participants moved as one beneath an immense perforated white sheet, forming a living metaphor for a shared social fabric. In this gentle merging of forms, hierarchy is suspended, and the work invites a collective, participatory meditation on equality, employing abstraction as a universal language that transcends individuality and binds participants within a shared structure.
Occupying the entirety of the rotunda is On Kawara’s Minimal Chronology of Dated Paintings, forming a minimalist diary and record of personal and collective time. By painting the numbers that denote each passing day, Kawara creates a fragment of space and materiality in which the durational act of painting absorbs the multiplicity of events and meanings implied within a single date, set against the relentless flow of time. By confronting the idea that linear time itself is a conventional and ultimately arbitrary human construction, Kawara’s date paintings distill life to its most essential marker—time alone—aligning with Minimalism’s drive toward radical reduction through their emphasis on the viewer’s direct encounter with the present. Meanwhile, in Europe, movements such as Zero in Germany and Arte Povera in Italy pushed the boundaries of sculpture through minimalist vocabularies and a direct engagement with space as a hybrid, active presence.
The additional perspectives and less expected figures presented in the Light section offer a fresh reading of how Minimalism enabled artists to investigate one of the most phenomenologically charged elements through which we access physical reality. In the 1960s and ’70s, light became a primary material. Artists including Dan Flavin, Nancy Holt, François Morellet, Robert Irwin, Mary Corse, Keith Sonnier and Chryssa worked with fluorescent tubes, neon, black light, projected light and natural illumination, driven by a broader inquiry into perception and immateriality as artificial and industrial lighting came to dominate the urban environment. Flavin’s fluorescent structures redefined spatial boundaries and architectural features, while Holt and Irwin explored the relational, phenomenological nature of light, focusing on how it organizes perception and bodily movement. Corse, meanwhile, experimented with Tesla coils and argon gas, producing works that appear to capture and hold light itself.
It is in these perspectives that we gain further evidence of how, through a minimalist language, these artists were already posing urgent questions that remain, or have become even more timely today. Ultimately, Minimal art, in its various declinations, was already probing the dynamics and structures that shape our relationship to reality and our physical position within a world of things transformed into products and meaning through human-made symbols and systems that often attempt to contain or neutralize, through illusion, the entropic nature of reality beyond human cognitive and sensory grasp.
The emphasis in these works rests on the moment of encounter itself: the phenomenology of seeing before and beyond any process of signification. Form becomes secondary to process, presence and the inherent agency of materials. Through deconstruction and reduction, these works introduce profound existential doubts rather than offering closed propositions, redirecting attention to a pre-linguistic register of experience—the first contact with reality, which already carries its own phenomenological truth. What they propose is an epistemology grounded in dynamic, open-ended relationships with matter. In doing so, the works cultivate a heightened awareness of the sensory core of our experience of the world, our only access within the limits of embodied perception.
In a culture saturated with mediated images and, increasingly, with algorithmic simulations and machine-generated forms, Minimalism restores the body as the primary filter and medium through which the world is apprehended—an insistence on embodied perception that feels newly urgent in a desensitized and increasingly alienated society, where digital mediation and elaboration govern, or can potentially substitute for, much of our experience of reality.
ANKARA, Jan 2 (Reuters) – Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said he would have a phone call with U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday to discuss peace efforts between Ukraine and Russia as well as issues surrounding Gaza.
Speaking to reporters in Istanbul on Friday, Erdogan also said Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan will attend a meeting of the “Coalition of the Willing”, a group of nations backing Ukraine, in Paris in coming days.
(Reporting by Huseyin Hayatsever; Editing by Jonathan Spicer )
KYIV, Jan 1 (Reuters) – Russia and Ukraine accused each other of targeting civilians over the New Year, with Moscow reporting a deadly strike on a hotel in territory it occupies in southern Ukraine while Kyiv said there had been another broad attack on its power supplies.
The reports coincide with intensive talks aimed at bringing an end to the nearly four-year-old war, overseen by U.S. President Donald Trump. Both countries have said the other is doing all it can to influence his views and shape the outcome.
“On New Year, Russia deliberately brings war. Over 200 attack drones were launched onto Ukraine in the night,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy wrote on Telegram, saying energy infrastructure in seven regions across Ukraine had been targeted.
Russia accused Ukraine of killing at least 24 people, including a child, in a drone strike on a hotel and cafe where civilians were seeing in the New Year in a Russian-controlled part of the Kherson region in southern Ukraine.
Ukraine’s military, which has accused Russia of killing many civilians in its own attacks on Ukrainian cities, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Zelenskiy said that Russia’s holiday season attacks showed Ukraine could not afford delays in air defence supplies.
“(Our) allies have the names of equipment which we are lacking. We expect that everything agreed with the United States at the end of December for our defence will arrive on time,” he said, without clarifying further.
RUSSIANS ALLEGE ‘WAR CRIME’
Vladimir Saldo, the Russian-installed governor of the region, said three Ukrainian drones had hit the celebrations in Khorly, a coastal village, in what he said was a “deliberate strike” against civilians. He said that many people had been burnt alive.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry said that as well as the 24 dead, 50 people had been injured, including six minors who were being treated in hospital.
“There is no doubt that the attack was planned in advance, with drones deliberately targeting areas where civilians had gathered to celebrate New Year’s Eve,” the ministry said in a statement, calling the attack a “war crime”.
On Monday, Moscow accused Kyiv of trying to strike a residence of President Vladimir Putin. Ukrainian and European officials have said the incident did not happen and U.S. security officials were also reported to have found that Ukraine did not target the residence. Russia said on Thursday it would send Washington proof.
Reuters was not able to immediately verify the reported Kherson region attack or photographs of what Saldo’s press service said was the aftermath on Thursday.
The images showed at least one dead body was visible beneath a white sheet. The building showed signs that a fire had raged and there were what looked like blood stains on the ground. Russia’s TASS news agency published video showing drone fragments, some with Ukrainian writing on them.
Ukrainian officials regularly report civilian deaths from Russian air attacks, including in the Ukrainian-held city of Kherson, which lies near the front line.
The Ukrainian governor of Kherson region, Oleksandr Prokudin, said that one man had been killed and an 87-year-old woman injured in attacks on the city on Thursday, posting a video showing the woman’s badly damaged apartment.
Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Oleksiy Kuleba said rail facilities had been attacked in three regions, including a locomotive depot and a station in the frontline region of Sumy.
The Russian defence ministry said on Thursday its strikes had hit military targets, as well as energy infrastructure which it claimed was being used to support Ukraine’s military.
In a separate report, Russia-appointed Saldo said later that a five-year-old child had been killed and three more people injured in a Ukrainian drone strike on a car near Tarasivka, another coastal village, close to Khorly. He did not provide evidence.
Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, told TASS that those who carried out the hotel attack and their commanders should be targeted.
Kherson is one of four regions in Ukraine which Russia claimed as its own in 2022, a move Kyiv and most Western countries denounced as an illegal land grab.
(Reporting by Max Hunder and Reuters bureaux; writing by Philippa Fletcher; editing by Ros Russell)
MOSCOW, Jan 1 (Reuters) – Russia said on Thursday it had extracted and decoded a file from a Ukrainian drone downed earlier this week that it said shows it had been targeting a Russian presidential residence and that it would hand over the relevant information to the United States.
Moscow accused Kyiv on Monday of trying to strike a residence of President Vladimir Putin in Russia’s northern Novgorod region with 91 long-range attack drones. It said Russia would review its negotiating position in ongoing talks with the U.S. on ending the Ukraine war.
Ukraine and Western countries have disputed Russia’s account of the alleged attempted strike.
In a statement posted on Telegram on Thursday, Russia’s Defence Ministry said: “Decryption of routing data revealed that the final target of the Ukrainian drone attack on December 29, 2025, was a facility at the Russian Presidential Residence in the Novgorod region.”
“These materials will be transferred to the American side through the established channels,” it added.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that U.S. national security officials had found Ukraine did not target Putin or one of his residences in a drone strike. Reuters could not immediately verify the report.
U.S. President Donald Trump initially expressed sympathy for the Russian charge, telling reporters on Monday that Putin had informed him of the alleged incident and that he was “very angry” about it.
By Wednesday, Trump appeared more sceptical, sharing on social media a New York Post editorial accusing Russia of blocking peace in Ukraine.
Ukraine has denied carrying out such an attack and described the accusation as part of a Russian disinformation campaign meant to drive a wedge between Kyiv and Washington after a weekend meeting between Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
(Reporting by Reuters, Writing by Felix LightEditing by Gareth Jones)
MOSCOW, Jan 1 (Reuters) – Ukrainian drones struck an oil refinery in Russia’s southern Krasnodar region, as well as an energy storage facility in the oil-rich Volga river region of Tatarstan, Russian authorities and Ukraine’s military said on Thursday.
Debris from a drone had hit the Ilskiy oil refinery in Krasnodar, causing no casualties but igniting a fire that was later extinguished, local authorities said.
In Tatarstan, Russian media cited the local governor’s press service as saying that an energy storage facility in the city of Almetyevsk had been hit, causing a blaze that was later put out.
Almetyevsk is located around 1,400 km (869 miles) from Ukraine.
The Ukrainian military said in a statement it had struck both facilities. Kyiv has been intensifying strikes against Russian energy infrastructure in recent months, aiming to cut off Moscow’s sources of financing for its military campaign in Ukraine.
(Reporting by Reuters, Writing by Felix LightEditing by Andrew Osborn)
Electricity supply is increasingly outpacing demand in Europe as renewable energy capacity grows, making negative prices a more frequent occurrence.
In early 2020, Spain’s installed solar power capacity totaled nearly 9 gigawatts, according to data from Red Eléctrica. In early 2025, it had soared to 32 GW, helped by subsidies.
With solar panels and wind turbines installed in more places—while energy storage capacity is still lagging—an especially sunny and windy day can generate more electricity than is needed, sending prices below zero.
By September, the number of hours in Spain with negative electricity prices had already topped 500 for the year to date, more than double the full-year total for 2024. Similarly, France’s hours had topped 400 by then, also exceeding its 2024 tally, and Germany was on a trajectory to do so as well.
Those rates are for the wholesale electricity market, meaning traders must pay someone to take the surplus energy instead of the other way around.
That doesn’t mean households are also paid to consume electricity, because those rates are often set in advance. But negative prices can eventually be felt in markets with more dynamic pricing regimes.
In fact, electricity prices for households in the European Union during the first half of the year were down 1.5% from the first half of 2024, according to data published in October. Excluding taxes Europeans paid, electricity prices fell more sharply and have been sliding since 2023, after spiking in 2021 and 2022.
By contrast, rising electricity prices in the U.S. have become a growing source of voter discontent as utilities race to build more capacity to feed skyrocketing demand from AI data centers.
The higher bills have fueled an overall affordability crisis that started with the post-pandemic inflation spike and was worsened by President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
While the annual inflation rate has cooled sharply since peaking in 2022, consumers are still reeling from the aggregate price hikes over the last five years and are demanding lower prices, not just slower increases.
The latest consumer price index data released earlier this month showed that electricity prices in November were up 6.9% year over year on an unadjusted basis.
To be sure, negative electricity prices also happen occasionally in the U.S., including in Texas, which has a more deregulated grid and significant wind power capacity.
But the Trump administration is cracking down on renewable energy, gutting subsidies for solar power and killing wind energy projects.
And negative prices in Europe aren’t helping the energy industry there as they weigh on producers’ profits and valuations for solar plants.
Countries are scrambling to boost battery storage. But in the short term, the challenging price environment has cooled development of new solar capacity, even where land, permits, and grid access have been secured.
“The market is flooded with ready-to-build projects that developers want to sell since they’re no longer good enough in the current market,” a senior executive at an owner of Spanish solar plants told the Financial Times.
ROME, Jan 1 (Reuters) – Swiss police believe around 40 people died and 100 were injured in a fire during a New Year’s Eve party in the resort town of Crans-Montana, the Italian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Thursday.
It added that the blaze was not thought to have been caused by arson. The victims could not be immediately identified because of the severity of their burns, the ministry added.
(Reporting by Crispian BalmerEditing by Gareth Jones)
“The fire started around 1:30 a.m. this morning in a bar called ‘Le Constellation,’” police spokesperson Gaëtan Lathion said. “More than a hundred people were in the building, and we are seeing many injured and many dead.”
Rescuers and fire-fighters work at the site of an explosion that ripped through a bar in Crans-Montana on January 1, 2026.(MAXIME SCHMID / AFP via Getty Images)
Investigators were working to determine the cause of the fire, police said.
“We’re just at the beginning of our investigation, but this is an internationally renown ski resort with lots of tourists,” Lathion said.
A police officer walks near ambulances at the site of an explosion that ripped through a bar in Crans-Montana on January 1, 2026. (MAXIME SCHMID / AFP via Getty Images)
A reception center and helpline have been established for impacted families, Lathion said.
Rescuers are seen at the site of an explosion that ripped through a bar in Crans-Montana on January 1, 2026. (MAXIME SCHMID / AFP via Getty Images)
A news conference was scheduled by police for 10 a.m. The community is in the heart of the Swiss Alps, about 25 miles north of the Matterhorn.
MOSCOW, Jan 1 (Reuters) – The Russian-installed governor of Ukraine’s southern Kherson region on Thursday accused Ukraine of killing at least 24 people in a drone strike on a hotel and cafe where New Year celebrations were being held.
The governor, Vladimir Saldo, made the allegation in a statement on the Telegram messaging service.
There was no immediate comment from Ukraine, and Saldo did not provide visuals or other evidence that would enable Reuters to immediately verify the allegation.
Saldo alleged in his post that three Ukrainian drones had struck the site of new New Year celebrations in Khorly, a coastal village, in what he said was a “deliberate strike”.
Russian state news agencies reported that at least 24 people had been killed and 29 more injured, citing the local branch of Russia’s emergencies ministry.
Kherson is one of four regions in Ukraine which Russia claimed as its own in 2022, a move Kyiv and most Western countries condemned as an illegal land grab.
(Reporting by Reuters Writing by Felix Light: Editing by Andrew Osborn)
ZURICH, Jan 1 (Reuters) – Several people were killed and others injured after a fire broke out in a bar in the ski resort of Crans-Montana in southwestern Switzerland, Swiss police said on Thursday.
The fire broke out at 1.30 a.m. (0030 GMT) in a bar called “Le Constellation”, police said in a statement. Swiss media said the blaze was sparked by an explosion.
The area has been completely closed off, and a no-fly zone has been imposed over Crans-Montana, police said, adding that the cause of the fire remained unclear.
More than 100 people were in the bar at the time of the explosion, Swiss media outlet Blick reported, citing police.
(Reporting by Shivani Tanna in BengaluruEditing by Neil Fullick and Gareth Jones)
