Latest Developments in Ukraine: Dec. 31

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The latest developments in Russia’s war on Ukraine. All times EST.

1:14 a.m.:

12:02 a.m.: Russian authorities announced Friday that soldiers and state employees deployed in Ukraine will be exempt from income tax, in the latest effort to encourage support of its military operation there, Agency France-Presse.

The new measure concerns all those fighting in the four Ukrainian territories Russia has declared as its own, although it does not completely control them: Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov cited an exemption contained in an anti-corruption law, which the Russian authorities published the details of Thursday evening.

Soldiers, police, members of the security services and other state employees serving in the four regions no longer have to supply information on “their income, their expenditure, their assets,” said the decree.

The decree also grants them the right to receive “rewards and gifts” if they are of “a humanitarian character” and received as part of the military operation in Ukraine.

In Russia, soldiers and senior officials close to the country’s military-industrial complex are regularly convicted in corruption cases in which large sums of money have been embezzled.

Some information in this report came from Agence France-Presse.