Snoop Dogg takes over Detroit Lions and Minnesota Vikings game with ‘Holiday Halftime Party’

(NEW YORK) — A U.S.-led coordination center based in Israel that will oversee implementation of the ceasefire agreement in Gaza is expected to become operational in coming days, two U.S. officials tell ABC News.

The command center, which is tasked with coordinating security, aid and rebuilding efforts inside Gaza, will be led by a U.S. three-star general, at least initially, who has not been identified publicly. The commander will have a foreign deputy, who would be the equivalent of a two-star officer, the officials said.

The center is located inside Israel, just northeast of Gaza at a location not being disclosed to the public for security reasons. Officials said the center will not be located on an Israeli military base to ensure it can remain open to officials from other countries involved in the rebuilding of Gaza.

The center is seen as key to being to execute the extraordinary logistics involved in trying to rebuild and secure Gaza after two years of war. The U.S. and other countries are still discussing what an international security force might look like and how it would operate inside the strip, as well as how food and other aid will be distributed.

Trump has already sent 200 U.S. troops to coordinate the heavy lift; those military units specialize in transportation, planning, logistics and security. They will be working alongside representatives from other partner nations, the private sector and non-governmental organizations.

Sources say the command center is starting off slow, reaching what the military calls “initial operational capability” in coming days.  

Senior White House advisers told reporters Wednesday that creation of the International Stabilization Force is under way. They said that Indonesia, Egypt, the UAE, Qatar, Azerbaijan and other Arab and Muslim countries have offered to play a role. 

“The International Stabilization Force is starting to be, starting to be constructed and and once that occurs, there’ll be more efforts, but there’s a lot of planning and a lot of very positive conversations between the sides,” one senior U.S. official said. 

 ABC News’ Isabella Murray contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(LONDON) — Russia’s offensive campaign in eastern and southern Ukraine has been grinding on throughout 2025, with much of the fighting of the last 12 months focused on devastated cities in the eastern Donetsk and northeastern Kharkiv regions.

But in September, Russian forces began a relatively rapid advance in the farmlands to the east of Zaporizhzhia, advancing up to six miles in places — according to Ukrainian military officials — as territorial defense units that had been holding the area for two years crumbled under sudden and intense offensive pressure applied by Moscow’s forces.

Russia’s unexpected breakthrough in Zaporizhzhia represented a rare instance of battlefield mobility in a war that has become characterized by labored attritional warfare, in which mechanized troop concentrations and supporting armored vehicles quickly become easy prey for the flocks of drones incessantly swarming above the front lines.

Among the Ukrainian units deployed to stem the Russian advance was the 225th Separate Assault Regiment, which had previously been fighting to repel Russian forces along the shared border in the northeastern Sumy Oblast.

“The situation there remains complicated, and we are trying to stabilize it,” Maj. Oleh Shyriaiev of the 225th regiment told ABC News by phone from close to the front. “It is a mistake to consider that it is 100% stabilized,” he added.

Representatives of the combatants are currently engaged in U.S.-sponsored shuttle diplomacy that the White House hopes will secure an end to Europe’s largest conflict since World War II and a war that U.S. President Donald Trump vowed to end within 24 hours of his return to the Oval Office.

Russian officials have repeatedly framed their slow battlefield gains as evidence of Moscow’s “inevitable” victory, in the words of Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov during a recent interview with ABC News. 

That interpretation is hotly disputed by Kyiv and its European allies, but the Kremlin nonetheless seeks to use its gradual seizure of new territory as leverage in the ongoing talks. “The space for freedom of decision-making narrows as territories are lost,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in November.

In foxholes, trenches and treelines along the contact line, Shyriaiev said his unit is focused on their day-to-day survival.

“I personally am skeptical about any kind of peace negotiations,” he said. “Even if some kind of a peace agreement is signed, Russia will not stop existing, and it will not stop being our enemy.”

Any deal, he suggested, “will just give time for Russia to regroup. And what happens next? We need to expect a new attack. No guarantees that Russia can give can be considered true guarantees.”

The focus of the Russian offensive in Zaporizhzhia is now in the area of Huliaipole, a small city which before the war was home to around 20,000 people. Only around 150 civilians remain in the devastated city, the head of its military administration told Ukrainian media earlier this month.

In the fields around the city, Ukrainian officials say they have largely stalled Russia’s forward momentum. Shyriaiev said his unit needed time to adapt to the new battlefield and wear down the attackers.

“We had to go out and create a blocking line, fulfil missions and create favorable conditions for further success,” he explained. “At the moment, everything we are doing is focused on stabilizing the front line and blocking the enemy.”

Ukrainian forces in the area are facing Russian units replenished with new recruits and new equipment, Shyriaiev said.

“The enemy has strengthened its UAV component and thanks to that, they are holding under control the access areas to the line of contact — or at least they are trying to hold it under control,” he said.

“The enemy has had some success because their units have been reconstituted according to the most cutting edge experience that they have,” Shyriaiev said. “They have been trained with the latest updates, they have all the ‘lessons learned'” by their predecessors, he added.

Those newly arrived troops are trying to use the wintry weather and resulting “dense fog” to their advantage, Shyriaiev said.

“When there are normal visibility conditions, we can see everything and control everything,” he said. “However, when there is fog around, the enemy is trying to take advantage of this and to infiltrate the space between our positions.”

For the Ukrainians, too, the weather offers opportunities, Shyriaiev said. “When visibility is good, it means that badly hidden or badly masked positions are an open target and the troops that are deployed there can be wounded or destroyed.”

Moscow’s ‘glacial’ advance

Russian President Vladimir Putin has given little indication that he intends to ease the frontline pressure on Kyiv’s troops, despite the recent fresh impetus given to U.S.-brokered peace negotiations.

At his annual end-of-year press conference on Friday, Putin said peace was only possible on the basis of “principles” he outlined in a speech last year, in which he made some of his most hardline demands — Ukraine’s permanent exclusion from NATO and Kyiv’s withdrawal from all of the territory Russia claims in eastern and southeastern Ukraine.

Putin again claimed that military momentum was with Moscow’s forces, saying its troops were “advancing on all fronts.”

Putin’s bombast does not align with battlefield realities, according to Ukrainian officials and independent analysts.

The U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War think tank said this month that Russian forces have seized 0.77% of Ukraine’s territory — some 1,802 square miles — over the past year, while sustaining disproportionately high casualties. The area captured is roughly equivalent to that of Anchorage, Alaska.

Ukraine’s military estimates that Russia has sustained around 1.2 million casualties since February 2022. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said this month that around 30,000 Russian troops are being killed each month. 

Russia does not release details about its casualties, making it difficult to independently confirm that figure. Ukrainian estimates of Russian casualties have broadly chimed with estimates from U.S. and European intelligence agencies since 2022. 

Ukraine likewise does not regularly disclose its casualty figures. Zelenskyy said in February 2025 that more than 46,000 Ukrainians have been killed and 380,000 wounded since 2022.

Peter Dickinson, the editor of the Atlantic Council think tank’s UkraineAlert service, wrote in December that while Moscow’s troops hold “the overall initiative,” its attacking units are “grinding forward at glacial pace while suffering catastrophic losses.”

Also this month, Zelenskyy visited the Kharkiv frontline city of Kupyansk, posting videos of himself in the center of the city as proof that Russia’s recent claim to have captured it was false. The visit, Dickinson said, “underscored the fact that Russian victory is anything but inevitable.”

But Putin appears committed to a relentless push, regardless of its slow pace and high cost. Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi said in a post to Facebook last week that Russia has amassed 710,000 troops along the front for its offensive operations.

“Despite the substantial losses, the Russian army is not giving up on continuing offensive operations, although it has not achieved significant operational success,” Syrskyi said.

Shyriaiev said that although his unit is “well-staffed” and motivated, the difference in manpower and resources is obvious at the front. The Russians, he said, “are focusing on mass in everything.”

Shyriaiev’s unit faces “massive amounts of infantry” attacking from “early morning and until late at night,” he said. “They conduct mechanized assaults on all kinds of vehicles — regular cars, motorbikes, buggies. It could also be proper military equipment, proper military armored vehicles.”

“They are leaving no stone unturned,” he continued. “The ratio of the size of our army and our resources and their resources is, of course, something unfavorable towards us. They have more resources. This is why they do achieve some successes, but that happens at a very high price.”

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(LONDON) — NATO fighter jets were scrambled and air defense systems put on alert in Poland in response to Russia’s latest overnight drone and missile strikes in Ukraine, the Armed Forces Operational Command in Warsaw said in a series of social media posts.

“Fighter jets have been scrambled and ground-based air defense systems as well as radar reconnaissance systems have reached a state of readiness,” the command said in a post to X.

“These actions are of a preventive nature and are aimed at securing the airspace and its protection, especially in areas adjacent to the threatened regions,” it added.

The alert lasted for just under four hours, after which the command said the fighters and air defense systems had “returned to standard operational activities.” No violations of Polish airspace were observed, a follow-up post to X said.

The Spanish and Czech air forces were involved in the response, the command said, as were German and Dutch air defense systems.

Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched 653 drones and 51 missiles — 17 of them ballistic missiles — into the country overnight. The air force said 585 drones and 30 missiles were shot down or suppressed.

Drone and missile impacts were reported across 29 locations, the air force said.

The attack — which consisted of 704 air attack weapons — was Russia’s largest overnight bombardment since it launched 705 munitions on the night of Oct. 29, according to Ukrainian air force data analyzed by ABC News.

The largest attack of the war to date took place on the night of Sept. 6 and involved 823 air attack vehicles. The latest overnight attack is only the fourth of Russia’s full-scale invasion to date in which the number of air attack vehicles used surpassed 700.

Ukrainian Minister of Internal Affairs Iho Klymenko said in a post to Telegram that 10 regions of the country came under attack, with direct hits to residential buildings, railways and energy infrastructure.

More than two dozen houses in the Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Zhytomyr and Lviv regions were damaged, according to Klymenko.

At least three people were injured in the Kyiv region, another three people were injured in the Dnipropetrovsk region and two people were injured in the Lviv region, Klymenko said.

In the Black Sea port city of Odesa, regional Gov. Oleh Kiper said an energy facility was damaged, resulting in disruptions to the supply of power and heating. Some 9,500 customers were without heating and 34,000 without water as of 9:30 a.m. local time.

There was also damage to energy infrastructure in the Chernihiv, Zaporizhzhia, Lviv and Dnipropetrovsk regions, according to authorities there.

The International Atomic Energy Agency — the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog — said in a post to X that Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant also temporarily lost all off-site power during the Russian strikes.

IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi “reiterates call for military restraint to avoid a nuclear accident,” the post said.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said she had “convened an emergency coordination meeting” with the ministers of internal affairs and energy as well as the leadership of the state-run energy companies and all services responsible for recovery operations.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said in a post to X, “Russia continues to disregard any peace efforts and instead strikes critical civilian infrastructure, including our energy system and railways.”

“This shows that no decisions to strengthen Ukraine and raise pressure on Russia can be delayed,” Sybiha added. “And especially not under the pretext of peace process.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a post to social media that energy facilities were “the main targets of these strikes.”

“Russia’s aim is to inflict suffering on millions of Ukrainians,” the president wrote. “That is exactly why additional pressure is needed. Sanctions must work, and so must our air defenses, which means we must maintain support for those defending lives.”

Russia’s Defense Ministry, meanwhile, said its forces downed at least 121 drones on Friday night into Saturday morning.

ABC News’ Morgan Winsor, Natalia Kushnir, Natalia Popova and Anna Sergeeva contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.