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Ukraine war briefing: Zelenskyy says military innovation will ‘transform’ air defences

Ukraine’s armed forces are introducing a new facet of air defence, made up of small groups deploying interceptor drones, as the country braces for new mass Russian attacks, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Monday. Ukraine is still reeling from a wave of Russian strikes earlier this month that knocked out power and heating to thousands of apartment blocks in freezing temperatures, particularly in the capital, and Zelenskyy has repeatedly called for air defences to be strengthened. “There will be a new approach to the use of air defences by the air force, concerning mobile fire groups, interceptor drones and other ‘short-range’ air defence assets,” the Ukrainian president said in his nightly video address. “The system will be transformed.” Zelenskyy announced the appointment of a new deputy air force commander, Pavlo Yelizarov, to oversee and develop the innovation. Zelenskyy also warned Ukrainians to be “extremely vigilant” ahead of anticipated new Russian attacks. “Russia has prepared for a strike, a massive strike, and is waiting for the moment to carry it out,” he said, urging every region in the country to “be prepared to respond as quickly as possible and help people”. Zelenskyy and foreign minister Andrii Sybiha both warned at the weekend that Ukrainian intelligence had noted Russia was conducting reconnaissance of specific targets, particularly substations that supply nuclear power plants. Ukrainian energy minister Denys Shmyhal said on Monday he had informed the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about Russian preparations for more strikes on Ukrainian energy facilities, including those that ensure the operations of nuclear plants. Russian forces launched a combined drone and missile attack on Kyiv early on Tuesday, triggering cuts in power and water supplies, the mayor of the Ukrainian capital said. A non-residential building had been hit and one person injured in the strike on the east bank of the Dnipro River, Vitali Klitschko said on Telegram. The Kyiv military administration said a storage area had been damaged and several cars set ablaze. The IAEA said on Monday that a back-up power line had been reconnected to Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant after repair work carried out under an IAEA-brokered ceasefire. The Ferosplavna-1 line is one of two high-voltage lines supplying electricity to the Russian-controlled plant in Ukraine and was disconnected earlier this month. Russia launched a barrage of drone strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure overnight to Monday, cutting off power in five regions across the country amid sub-zero temperatures and high demand, Ukrainian officials said. Russian forces had launched 145 drones and air defences shot down 126 of them, the Ukrainian air force said. “As of this morning, consumers in Sumy, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv and Chernihiv regions are without power,” the energy ministry said. “Emergency repair work is under way if the security situation allows.” Ukraine will face enormous challenges to organise its first elections since Russia’s 2022 invasion, with its infrastructure shattered and millions of people displaced by war, the country’s election chief said. Bringing Ukraine’s voter registry up to date and making the proper preparations for a vote would take significant time, Oleh Didenko, the head of Ukraine’s Central Election Commission, told Reuters. Amid diplomatic efforts to end the war, US president Donald Trump has demanded Ukraine hold elections, even though they are banned under martial law – in force since the invasion – and a majority of Ukrainians oppose a wartime ballot. Vladimir Putin’s special envoy Kirill Dmitriev will travel to Davos in Switzerland this week and hold meetings with members of the US delegation on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Reuters has reported, citing two sources. Ukraine’s top negotiator, Rustem Umerov, said on Sunday that talks with US officials on ending the war would continue at the WEF this week.

Trump says ‘no comment’ when asked if he would seize Greenland by force – as it happened

Beijing has urged the US to stop using the “so-called ‘China threat’” as a justification for imposing tariffs on European countries which have opposed Trump’s plan to acquire Greenland. MPs in the UK’s House of Commons have called for a boycott of the World Cup this summer in response to Trump’s plans to annex Greenland. Making tariff threats is “no way to treat allies”, the UK’s foreign secretary Yvette Cooper has said. Denmark has proposed that Nato start surveillance operations in Greenland, with the support of the Arctic island. Nato chief Mark Rutte took note of this, Danish defence minister Troels Lund Poulsen said. In a brief telephone interview with NBC News, Donald Trump declined to rule out seizing Greenland by force – “No comment,” he told the broadcaster – but insisted that he would “100%” push ahead with his plans to hit European nations with tariffs if he doesn’t get Greenland. The US president’s comments come after he sent a letter to Norway’s prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre telling him that “considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace.” Leaders across Europe have been weighing in on both the issue of Greenland and the threat of tariffs from the US, with some like Roland Lescure, France’s finance and economic minister, warning that Europe “has to step up” and respond to Trump’s tariff threats while Simon Harris, Ireland’s deputy prime minister and finance minister, called for “cool heads”. Keir Starmer, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, held a press conference criticising Trump’s punitive tariff plan as “completely wrong” and maintained that “any decision on Greenland belongs to people of Greenland and Denmark alone” – but stopped short of committing to any form of retaliation against US tariffs. Meanwhile, France’s Emmanuel Macron said no amount of intimidation would work, while the Swedish prime minister Ulf Kristersson warned the EU would not be “blackmailed” and the Norwegian prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre warned that “threats have no place among allies”. German chancellor Friedrich Merz said the focus was on trying to talk Trump out of imposing tariffs over Greenland – but also said that it was important for European Nato allies to do more to safeguard the region. EU leaders called for calm on all sides as they attempt to work among themselves – and with the White House – to avoid full-on trade war. European Commission’s trade spokesperson Olof Gill told reporters on Monday that leaders want to resolve the crisis through talks as soon as possible. But “should the threatened tariffs be imposed, the European Union has tools at its disposal and is prepared to respond because we will do everything necessary to protect EU’s economic interests,” Gill added. Thanks for following the blog with me, Donna Ferguson. Goodnight.

Kremlin says Putin has been invited to join Trump’s Gaza ‘board of peace’

The Kremlin has announced that Vladimir Putin has been invited to join Donald Trump’s “board of peace”, set up last week with the intention that it would oversee a ceasefire in Gaza. The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told journalists on Monday that Russia was seeking to “clarify all the nuances” of the offer with Washington, before giving its response. The claim of an invitation comes as Putin shows no sign of ending his war in Ukraine, in which hundreds of thousands have been killed and Russian troops have carried out atrocities against civilians. The Russian president has repeatedly rejected proposals of ceasefire along the current frontlines. The Kremlin also said on Monday that Putin’s special envoy Kirill Dmitriev would be attending the World Economic Forum in Davos this week and would meet members of the US delegation there. It is unclear whether those meetings will involve discussions of the Gaza board. The invitation to Putin, which has yet to be confirmed by Washington, raises more questions about the intended agenda for the board. It was originally part of Trump’s ceasefire proposals for the Gaza war, and was supposed to oversee the transition to a lasting peace in the territory and supervise the work of a committee of Palestinian experts, also announced last week, who would take care of the day-to-day running of Gaza. The vaguely described scheme was endorsed in a UN security council resolution in November. The first appointments to the board, announced on Friday, included Trump himself as chair, with a “founding executive board” that included the former British prime minister Tony Blair and the current US secretary of state, Marco Rubio. Also appointed were Trump’s troubleshooting envoy, the property developer Steve Witkoff, the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and the president of the World Bank, Ajay Banga. It has emerged over the weekend that Trump had also sent invitations to the leaders of states including Argentina, Paraguay, Turkey, Egypt, Canada and Thailand. Belarus announced that its leader, Alexander Lukashenko, had been invited and that he welcomed the invitation. The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, was reportedly approached with an offer of membership last week, although he was awaiting a formal invitation. The invitation letters included a “charter” saying the board would seek to “solidify peace in the Middle East”, and at the same time “embark on a bold new approach to resolving global conflict”. Each national leader would serve a maximum of three years on the board, unless their governments paid a $1bn (£745m) fee to become a permanent member, in an echo of Trump’s elite membership structure for his Mar-a-Lago estate and his golf clubs. It is unclear who would be the recipient of such membership payments and how they would be used. The charter states: “The board of peace is an international organisation that seeks to promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict.” It adds that the board should have “the courage to depart from approaches and institutions that have too often failed”, likely to be a swipe at the UN. News agencies quoted French officials on Monday as saying that France would decline the offer of membership, because of the board’s broader aspirations. Earlier in the day the French foreign ministry had said it was reviewing an invitation to join the new body “whose project extends beyond the situation in Gaza”. The ministry statement “reiterates its attachment to the United Nations charter, [which] remains the cornerstone of effective multilateralism”. The French press agency AFP also quoted a Canadian official as saying the country would not pay for membership, nor had it been asked for payment, but it was not clear whether Ottawa would also reject the invitation outright. As of Monday evening, two countries had confirmed acceptance of the invitation: Hungary, and Vietnam in the person of the general secretary of the Vietnamese communist party, Tô Lâm). The inclusion of Putin in a global body supposed to oversee peace around the world would add considerable weight to longstanding suspicions that Trump leans heavily in the Russian president’s favour in his approach to the Ukraine conflict. At the same time as he was apparently inviting friendly leaders to join the board of peace, Trump also sent a letter to Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, over the weekend, telling him that “considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace”. Trump has been escalating pressure on Denmark and the rest of Europe to accept his plans to take over Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory, and has imposed punitive measures on European countries who have objected most strenuously to his plan. The UK is one of the targeted countries, and Starmer denounced the tariffs as “completely wrong” on Monday, restating that “any decision on Greenland belongs to the people of Greenland and Denmark alone”. However, Starmer did not commit to the imposition of retaliatory tariffs against the US, and downplayed the prospect of Trump using force in Greenland. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, meanwhile suggested that a US takeover of Greenland would cement Trump’s place in the history books. “Here, perhaps, it is possible to abstract from whether this is good or bad, whether it will comply with the parameters of international law or not,” Peskov said, but he added it would “certainly go down in history”. The ceasefire in Gaza, which the board of peace was originally meant to oversee, remains in limbo. Last week, the US declared the beginning of a second phase in which the handpicked Palestinian technocratic committee was supposed to take over governance and an international stabilisation force was due to take over security. With the territory still coming under regular Israeli bombardment, there is no immediate prospect of either development and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, restated his government’s opposition to any troops from Turkey or Qatar, two key regional backers of the plan, taking part in the stabilisation force.

Dozens of IS prisoners freed in Syria amid clashes between army and Kurdish-led forces

Dozens of inmates from a jail holding Islamic State prisoners have been freed in Syria amid clashes between the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and government-affiliated forces in the north-east of the country. Videos released by the SDF showed what it said were IS members being broken out from a jail in Shaddadi by figures in black balaclavas. It said it had lost control of the building after an attack by government-affiliated fighters that killed or wounded dozens. The Syrian army confirmed the escape late on Monday and imposed a total curfew in Shaddadi, the state news agency Sana reported. But it denied attacking the jail and blamed the SDF for the escapes, saying it would comb the city in search of the militants. The clashes came less than 24 hours after Syria’s president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, said his government had agreed a ceasefire with the SDF and would move to dismantle the group’s decade-long control of the country’s north-east and dramatically consolidate his rule. The sudden defeat of the SDF in Syria’s north raises questions about its ability to retain control of prisons and camps housing tens of thousands of male and female supporters of IS. Fighting was also reported outside al-Aqtan prison in formerly SDF-held Raqqa, and two others in the city – Taameer and a juvenile detention centre – were said by Kurdish sources to have been emptied by local people. The Syrian army said it had arrived at al-Aqtan to secure it “despite the presence of SDF forces inside”. Many other IS detainees, originally from 70 countries including the UK, are held further to the north-east in Kurdish majority areas, where many have been detained since the territorial defeat of the terrorist group in 2019. The bulk of female detainees and their families are being held in al-Hawl, which holds an estimated 26,000 people, and the smaller Roj camp, where Shamima Begum is housed. About 4,500 men are held at the Panorama or Gweiran prison. It remains unclear who freed the prisoners in Shaddadi. The SDF claimed the armed men involved were “Damascus factions” and that several of its fighters were beheaded. It said in a statement that the US-led anti-IS coalition did not respond despite repeated appeals for assistance to a nearby coalition base. The US military’s central command did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. Kurdish-led forces backed by the US rounded up tens of thousands of people linked to IS after the group’s defeat. Washington later left responsibility for the camps to its Kurdish allies, but as US troops scale back, pressure is growing for Syria’s new authorities to take over. According to the text of the deal between the SDF and Damascus, the administration responsible for the IS prisoners and camps, as well as the forces securing them, is to be integrated with the Syrian government, which will assume “full legal and security responsibility” for these facilities. But the plan, also part of efforts to fold the Kurdish-led SDF into a reunified national military, is fraught with mistrust as many Kurds fear the government, led by Islamist former rebels once linked to al-Qaida, could loosen controls on IS networks. Among the prisoners and detainees are an estimated 55 men, women and children from the UK, including Begum, many of whom have had their citizenship removed because of their IS links. Reprieve, a UK-based human rights campaign group, said the current situation was “a reality check” for Britain’s refusal to repatriate people held in Syria. Other countries, including the US, which has repatriated 28 people, have gradually brought back many of their citizens who were otherwise held in indefinite detention. Maya Foa, the chief executive of Reprieve, said “volatility of the current situation demands an urgent rethink”. Foa added: “The only safe thing to do is bring British nationals home and prosecute the adults where there is a case to answer.” Sharaa’s jihadist career was forged in post-invasion Iraq, where he was drawn into al-Qaida’s orbit through its Iraqi affiliate, a precursor of IS. Detained by the US in 2005, he deepened his militant ties and encountered Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who would later dispatch him to Syria to set up Jabhat al-Nusra. The group rose quickly but split from Baghdadi in 2013, prompting Sharaa to first align openly with al-Qaida before severing that link in 2016 to present a more locally rooted insurgency that would ultimately become Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Since toppling Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, Syria’s new leaders have struggled to assert full authority over the country. An agreement was reached in March that was to have merged the SDF with Damascus, but it did not gain traction as both sides accused each other of violating the deal. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan – long hostile to the SDF – on Monday hailed the Syrian army for what he called its “careful” offensive to take over Kurdish-held areas of the country’s north-east. “The Syrian army’s careful management of this sensitive operation … is commendable. Despite provocations, the Syrian army has passed a successful test, avoiding actions that would put them in the wrong when they are in the right,” he said. Turkey sees the SDF as an extension of the Kurdish militant PKK and a major threat along the 560-mile (900km ) border it shares with Syria. “The principle of one state, one army is indispensable for stability,” said Erdoğan, describing the ceasefire and the integration agreement as “a very important achievement for lasting peace and stability in Syria”. He urged that the deal be implemented as soon as possible, saying there was “no excuse for stalling or playing for time. The era of terror in our region is over. No one should miscalculate.”

Donald Trump links Greenland threats to Nobel snub as EU trade war looms

Donald Trump has linked his repeated threats to seize control of Greenland to his failure to win the Nobel peace prize, as transatlantic tensions over the Arctic island escalated further and threatened to rekindle a trade war with the EU. In an extraordinary text message sent on Sunday to the Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, the US president wrote that after being snubbed for the prize, he no longer felt the need to think “purely of peace”. “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace,” he wrote, adding that the US needed “complete and total control” of Greenland. Trump has ramped up his push to grab the island, a largely self-governing part of Denmark, in recent weeks, saying that the US would take control of the Arctic island “one way or the other” and, over the weekend: “Now it is time, and it will be done!!!” On Saturday he threatened to impose from 1 February a punitive 10% tariff, increasing later to 25%, on imports from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands and Finland unless they dropped their objections to his plan. The dispute has plunged trade relations between the EU and the US into fresh chaos, forcing the bloc to consider retaliatory measures, and also risks unravelling the Nato transatlantic alliance that has guaranteed western security for decades. Trump has rocked the EU and Nato by refusing to rule out military force to seize the strategically important, mineral-rich island, which is covered by many of the protections offered by the two organisations since Denmark is a member of both. He has repeatedly said the US needs to take control of the territory for “national security”, despite the US already having a military base on the island and a bilateral agreement with Denmark allowing it to massively expand its presence there. In a brief telephone interview with NBC on Monday, Trump declined to comment on whether he would rule out seizing Greenland by force, insisted he would “100%” push ahead with his tariff plans, and blamed Norway for denying him the Nobel prize. “Norway totally controls it despite what they say. They like to say they have nothing to do with it, but they have everything to do with it,” he added. The Nobel peace prize is awarded by the Norwegian Nobel committee, a five-member private body whose members – mostly retired politicians – are appointed by Norway’s parliament but whose decisions are independent of the government. Trump campaigned hard to win last year’s prize, which was awarded to María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader. She collected it in Oslo last month but has since dedicated it to Trump and last week gave her medal to him. In his text message to Støre, Trump said Denmark “cannot protect” Greenland from Russia or China, adding: “Why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago.” The US president said he had “done more for Nato than anyone else since its founding, and now Nato should do something for the United States”. The world was “not secure unless we have Complete and Total control of Greenland”, he said. Denmark’s defence minister, Troels Lund Poulsen, said on Monday he and the Greenlandic foreign minister, Vivian Motzfeldt, had discussed with the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, the possibility of a Nato mission in Greenland and the Arctic. The Danish foreign minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, said it was “important that all of us who believe in international law speak out to show Trump you can’t go down this road”. Trump had to see that “putting pressure on us” would not work, he said. Greenland said it was a democratic society and must be allowed to decide its own future. “We will not be pressured,” said the territory’s prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen. “We stand firm on dialogue, respect and international law”. EU leaders will meet for an emergency summit in Brussels on Thursday to discuss their response, which could include a package of tariffs on €93bn (£80bn) of US imports that has been suspended for six months since the two sides reached a trade deal last year. Another possibility is the bloc’s anti-coercion instrument” (ACI), which has never been used but would limit US access to public tenders, investments or banking activities and restrict trade in services, including digital services. The EU said it was continuing to engage “at all levels” and the use of the ACI was not off the table. Germany’s vice-chancellor, Lars Klingbeil, and France’s finance minister, Roland Lescure, both denounced Trump’s tariff plans as blackmail. Støre, who had not been scheduled to attend this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, said he would do so on Wednesday and Thursday, overlapping with Trump’s planned appearance at the annual political and business gathering. Støre said on Monday Trump’s Sunday text message had come in response to a message from him half an hour earlier saying he and the Finnish president, Alexander Stubb, wanted to “take this down and de-escalate”, and proposing a phone call. Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said he would also try to meet Trump in the Swiss resort on Wednesday, adding that “if we are confronted with tariffs we consider unreasonable, then we are capable of responding”. Merz said Germany and other EU countries agreed “that we want to avoid any escalation in this dispute if at all possible”, but “if necessary, we will of course protect our European interests as well as our German national interests”. The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, said he was working closely with EU leaders and called for calm discussion between allies. Trump’s tariff plans were “completely wrong”, he said, but he added he did not think military action to take Greenland was likely. Several EU states including Germany, Denmark and Italy, as well as the UK, have suggested Trump believes the eight Nato countries that sent troops to Greenland last week – and are now the targets of his tariffs – did so as a warning shot to the US. Some diplomats have said this may be a misunderstanding based on biased US TV reports: the troops were on a reconnaissance mission, and their deployment was in line with US concerns over a supposedly growing Russian threat in the Arctic. Others lean more towards wilful misinterpretation in Washington: US representatives were present when the joint operation’s purpose was outlined at a Nato council meeting last week, and the US was invited to join it. “The difficulty is that as trust breaks down, Trump makes his decisions based on wild speculation on US TV, and not from his diplomatic allies,” one western diplomat said.

Should riders pick up after their horses, yay or neigh? | Letters

Adrian Chiles traces the recent history of dog owners picking up their dog’s poo, starting from New York (I’ve been thinking a lot about dog poo, 14 January). Certainly in this country it is now possible to go for a walk in the countryside or in towns without having to watch your step. However, quite often a footpath or bridleway is made impassable due to large dumps of horse manure. Dog owners have taken on their duty to clear up after their pets, always armed with dog-poo bags. Why are horse owners and riders allowed to make much larger, smellier and long-lasting heaps of horse excrement? I can imagine that it would be inconvenient for a horse rider to dismount so as to clear up the poo, but I don’t see why the riding stables should not have this duty. I look forward to the day when walkers can enjoy the environment free of dog and horse-made hazards. Ros Ward Durham • Adrian Chiles is right about the “seismic cultural shift” in dog-poo etiquette, but as a Dutchman housesitting across rural England, I’ve noticed that the revolution stopped at the stirrups. Recently, while I was performing the civic duty of scooping a modest deposit from the dog I was looking after, a rider trotted past. Her horse promptly left a steaming mountain of manure directly in the centre of the track. With a polite nod, she moved on, leaving me – bag in hand – contemplating the Great British poo divide. It seems that if your beast has paws, you’re a social pariah for a missed scoop. If it has hooves, the carefree “leave-it-where-it-lands” era of the 1950s lives on. Until I see an equestrian dismount with a shovel, I’ll assume the status of the “doo” depends entirely on the owner’s place in the class system. Jan Veenstra Terherne, the Netherlands • Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.

‘We had to remove the dead to get to the living’: train crash shocks Spanish town

Just after 2.45pm on Monday, a huge yellow-and-green crane lorry swung off the main road that cuts through the forested hills of eastern Andalucía and beetled down a track to begin picking up the enormous, wrecked pieces of Spain’s worst rail disaster in more than a decade. Behind it rolled a support lorry and a convoy of police cars. A few minutes’ drive away, between groves of olive and oak trees, lay the two stricken trains that had smashed into each other on Sunday night, killing at least 39 people and critically injuring at least 12 others. As investigators and Guardia Civil officers walked up and down the line by the twisted carriages, the nearby town of Adamuz was in the early stages of trying to process what had happened a few kilometres from its outskirts. What the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, had called “a night of deep pain for our country” had given way to a day of shock and bewilderment in this municipality of 4,000 inhabitants in Andalucía’s Córdoba province. Adamuz’s municipal events hall, which had been turned into an emergency response centre to which the injured passengers were ferried, told its own tale. A dozen trestle tables were neatly stacked with hundreds of blankets brought by local people. Inside and outside the hall, Guardia Civil officers mixed with local police, civil emergency workers – and dozens of journalists. One ashen-faced officer was not sure how to sum up the events of the past few hours. “It was what it was,” he said. “And it was bad.” Others described the crash site in terms as eloquent as they were horrific. “There were moments when we had to remove the dead to get to the living,” Francisco Carmona, Córdoba’s firefighting chief, told Onda Cero radio. Rafael Moreno, the mayor of Adamuz, said he would never forget what he had seen on the track: “People asking and begging for help. Those leaving the wreckage. Images that will always stay in my mind.” Despite the enormity of what had happened, the one thing everyone could agree on was that the people of Adamuz had done all they could to help those who had been onboard the high-speed Iryo train travelling from Málaga to Madrid and the Renfe train from Madrid to Huelva. Some had rushed down to the tracks to help, while others had grabbed what they could and headed down to the municipal hall. A local woman called Carme said she knew something was very wrong when she heard the sirens and saw ambulances tearing through the town. Before long, local WhatsApp groups were sharing news of the diaster. “It was very scary and it was a really painful night,” she said. “I tried to help by sending my 17-year-old son down to the hall with some blankets and a dressing gown.” José María Mendoza, a 75-year-old “born and bred” in Adamuz, said he and his neighbours had never lived through anything remotely comparable with Sunday night. Standing on the pavement near the municipal hall, he said people were still struggling to accept what he called “an awful tragedy”. “It was a bad, bad, bad night,” he said. “But the whole town pitched in and rallied round even though this was the first time that anything like this has ever happened round here. People came with food and blankets because it was cold and everyone did what they could.” As the crane lorry got to work, the helicopter that had been circling the hills rattled out of sight and Adamuz’s large, draughty hall began to empty, thoughts – and action – turned to the causes of the crash and to the process of identifying its victims. The Guardia Civil opened five offices – in Córdoba, Málaga, Sevilla, Huelva and Madrid – where relatives of the missing could seek information and leave DNA samples. On a street in Adamuz, Benjamín Peñas, a 50-year-old builder, took a break from a refit to reflect on the terrible events of the past 20 hours. “We all did what we could,” he said. “Some people tried to get down to the crash site but pretty soon it had all been cordoned off by the emergency services. So we all took what we could down to the hall.” Peñas himself was up until 1.30am ferrying blankets, water and medical supplies down to the hall. “Some of the people I saw there were too deep in shock to be able to take in what had happened; it just hadn’t sunk in,” he said. “But others were bruised and bleeding. It is terrible to see your town make news around the world because of something like this.”