Here is the situation on Thursday, August 8, 2024.
Fighting
- Russia declared a local state of emergency and evacuated thousands of residents from areas close to the border in its southern Kursk region after reporting hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers, supported by tanks and armoured vehicles, crossed the border near the town of Sudzha. Russian President Vladimir Putin condemned the “large-scale provocation”. Ukraine has not confirmed the assault.
- Russia’s Ministry of Health said 31 civilians, including six children, were injured in the fighting. Acting governor of the Kursk region, Alexey Smirnov, said on Tuesday five people had been killed in the fighting. There was no information on military casualties.
- Russia’s Rossiya-24 said war correspondent Yevgeny Poddubny was in intensive care in a local hospital after he was injured in a Ukrainian drone attack while reporting from the Kursk region.
- At least four people were killed and one injured in Russian shelling in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. Regional Governor Vadym Filashkin said an elderly man and woman were killed in Antonivka village, about 5 kilometres (3.1 miles) from the combat zone. A man and a woman were killed in a separate attack on the Mykhaylivka settlement.
- At least one person was injured and nearly two dozen homes damaged, according to regional authorities, in Russia’s third consecutive overnight attack on the Kyiv region.
- Ukraine’s air force said it shot down all 30 drones Russia launched over seven regions of Ukraine.
- Ukraine’s military intelligence agency confirmed its forces conducted a raid on the Russian-controlled Tendra Spit in the northwest of the Black Sea, saying they damaged equipment and fortifications and inflicted casualties. Moscow-installed authorities in the area said on Tuesday that Russian forces had repelled a Ukrainian attempt to land on the Russian-held spit.
Politics and diplomacy
- Estonian prosecutors charged Svetlana Burceva, a 57-year-old Russian-Estonian journalist, with treason and violating international sanctions on Moscow, the AFP news agency reported, quoting a statement from state prosecutor Eneli Laurits. Burceva has been working with Estonian online sites controlled by Russia’s state-owned Rossiya Segodnya media group since 2017.
- A Moscow court jailed Russian military blogger Andrei Kurshin for six-and-a-half years after the former soldier was found guilty of “knowingly spreading false information about Russia’s armed forces”. Kurshin had accused Russian forces of cutting water supplies to Ukrainian civilians and bombing a maternity hospital on his Telegram channel.
- Russian-American dual citizen Ksenia Karelina pleaded guilty in a Russian court to a charge of treason, state news agency RIA Novosti quoted her lawyer as saying on Wednesday. Karelina is on trial in the city of Yekaterinburg over a donation she made in 2022 to a charity supporting Ukraine.