Here is the situation on Tuesday, August 20, 2024.
Fighting
- Russia said Ukraine attacked the third and last bridge across the River Seym in the Kursk region, where Kyiv mounted a surprise incursion across the border on August 6.
- In his first comments on the offensive’s objectives, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the aim of the offensive was to create a “buffer zone” and limit the ability of Russia to launch long-range attacks on Ukraine. Ukrainian forces were in control of more than 1,250 square kilometres (483 square miles) of land and 92 settlements in the Kursk region, he added later.
- Ukraine ordered families with children to immediately leave the town of Pokrovsk in the eastern Donetsk region as Russian troops advanced. About 53,000 people are still thought to be living there.
- As an indication of the intensity of the fighting on the Pokrovsk front, Ukraine’s military said its forces were involved in 63 skirmishes on Monday around Pokrovsk, and 21 in the Toretsk area. Some of the battles continued into the night, the military said.
- Russia’s Ministry of Defence, meanwhile, said that its forces had captured the town of Zalizne near Toretsk. About 5,000 people lived in Zalizne before Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
- At least four people were killed in Russian attacks on Toretsk and Zarichne, another front-line settlement, Ukraine said.
- Denis Pushilin, the Moscow-installed governor in Russian-occupied Donetsk, said at least one woman was killed and 10 people injured after Ukrainian artillery fire hit a bus stop in the city of Donetsk.
- Vasily Golubev, the governor of Russia’s southern Rostov region, said more than 40 Russian firefighters had been injured tackling a days-long fire at an oil facility hit by a Ukrainian drone. Golubev said 18 of the firefighters were being treated in hospital with five in intensive care.
- The European branch of the World Health Organization said it had recorded a total of 1,940 attacks on healthcare facilities in Ukraine since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Politics and diplomacy
- Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit Ukraine on Friday and meet Zelenskyy. It is the first visit by an Indian leader in more than 30 years. Modi was in Moscow last month and met Russian President Vladimir Putin.
- Russia complained to Germany over its investigation into the 2022 explosions that ruptured the Nord Stream gas pipelines after a key suspect escaped arrest in Poland despite a German warrant. The suspect – a Ukrainian diver – had left Poland before he could be detained.
- Russia banned a number of “hostile” British think tanks and 32 of their staff. The list includes the prominent Chatham House foreign affairs think tank, as well as the Aga Khan Foundation.
- Russian prosecutors said they had designated The Clooney Foundation for Justice, a US nonprofit group, as an “undesirable” organisation for carrying out work at “a Hollywood scale” to discredit Moscow. The foundation was founded by actor George Clooney and his wife, human rights lawyer Amal Clooney.
- Belarus deployed aircraft and air defence troops to its border with Ukraine, a day after President Alexander Lukashenko announced he would station almost a third of the country’s military along the frontier.