Here is the situation on Friday, September 6, 2024.
Fighting
- Ukraine emergency services said at least 55 people had been confirmed dead and 328 injured after they completed their search and rescue operation at a military educational institute in the Ukrainian town of Poltava that was hit by a Russian missile on Tuesday.
- Belgorod Regional Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said one civilian was killed in Ukrainian shelling on the town of Shebekino in the southern border region.
- Ukraine’s air force said it shot down 60 out of 78 drones launched by Russia in an overnight attack. It added that Russia also used one ballistic Iskander-M missile in the bombardment.
- Ukraine’s top military commander, Oleksandr Syrskii, told the CNN news channel that Kyiv’s incursion into Russia’s southern Kursk region was working and that there had been no Russian advances on a key sector of the eastern front for six days.
- Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the incursion had failed to slow Russia’s advance in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. Putin said the “main” goal of Russia’s full-scale invasion was to take control of the Donbas.
- Ukraine cancelled a train that was set to evacuate residents from the city of Pokrovsk in eastern Donetsk amid fears of a possible Russian attack. Russian forces are within 10 kilometres (six miles) of the city. Officials are urging the 27,000 people who still live there to leave.
Politics and diplomacy
- Ukraine’s parliament approved Andrii Sybiha as the country’s new foreign minister after accepting the resignation of his predecessor, Dmytro Kuleba. The change is part of the biggest Ukrainian government shake-up since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
- Putin said that China, India and Brazil could act as mediators in potential peace talks over Ukraine and that a preliminary agreement reached between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in the first weeks of the war could serve as the basis for negotiation.
- The United States charged five Russian military officers for allegedly conducting cyberattacks on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine in the years leading up to its invasion. Revising a June indictment, the US Justice Department said a unit of Russia’s military intelligence agency started “large-scale cyber operations” as early as 2020.
- The Justice Department said it had charged Virginia-based Russian television contributor Dimitri Simes and his wife Anastasia Simes with money laundering in two separate schemes to breach US sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
Weapons
- The British government said it would provide Ukraine with 650 lightweight multi-role missiles worth 162 million pounds ($213m) to help protect the country from Russian drones and bombing. They are expected to be delivered by the end of the year.
- US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and General CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will host a meeting in Germany of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, which is made up of military leaders from more than 50 countries. The US said the meeting’s priority would be to boost Ukraine’s air defences and energise “the defence industrial bases” of allies to ensure longterm support for Kyiv.
- The US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations announced it would hold a hearing next week with four semiconductor companies on the use of US-made chips in Russian weapons deployed in the war in Ukraine.