Kyiv also said that Russian forces launched two missile strikes and 72 air strikes, and used 1,024 kamikaze drones, along with 4,200 artillery attacks that targeted Ukrainian positions and settlements, AA reports. In Ukraine's Kharkiv region, Ukrainian forces said they prevented Russian advances towards Mala Shapkivka and Topoli, while Moscow's troops launched 16 attacks in Ukraine's Kupiansk region, with Kyiv's forces claiming to have repelled 14, as battles continue, Anadolu reports. Russia said oil flows through the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, a major route for supplying Kazakhstan and exporting to the global market, have been reduced by 30 to 40 percent after a Ukrainian drone attack on a pumping station. The Caspian pipeline, which ships more than 1 percent of daily global oil supplies, stretches over 1,500km (939 miles) and carries crude oil from Kazakhstan's Tengiz oilfield on Russia's northeastern shores of the Caspian Sea as well as from Russian producers. Freedom in Russia and the end of Russian President Vladimir Putin's government depends on Ukraine winning the war, former chess world champion and Kremlin critic Garry Kasparov said.

Instruction tuning in low-resource languages remains underexplored due to limited text data, particularly in government and cultural domains. To address this, we introduce and open-source a large-scale (10,600 samples) instruction-following (IFT) dataset, covering key institutional and cultural knowledge relevant to Kazakhstan. Our dataset enhances LLMs' understanding of procedural, legal, and structural governance topics. We employ LLM-assisted data generation, comparing open-weight and closed-weight models for dataset construction, and select GPT-4o as the backbone. Each entity of our dataset undergoes full manual verification to ensure high quality. We also show that fine-tuning Qwen, Falcon, and Gemma on our dataset leads to consistent performance improvements in both multiple-choice and generative tasks, demonstrating the potential of LLM-assisted instruction tuning for low-resource languages.

Fox News correspondent Stephanie Bennett has the latest on the aftermath of the Kazakhstan plane crash on'Special Report.' Crew members and survivors of the Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed in Kazakhstan on Christmas Day say they heard at least one loud bang before the aircraft crashed in a ball of fire, heightening speculation that a Russian anti-aircraft missile may have been responsible for the tragedy. The Embraer 190 passenger jet flying from Azerbaijan to Russia crashed near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan after diverting from an area of southern Russia where Moscow has repeatedly used air defense systems against Ukrainian attack drones. At least 38 people were killed while 29 survived. Subhonkul Rakhimov, one of the passengers aboard Flight J2-8243, told Reuters from the hospital that he had begun to recite prayers and prepare for the end after hearing a bang.