Here is the situation on Wednesday, November 20:
Fighting and weapons
- Ukraine has used the United States-made long-range Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) to hit a military facility in the Russian border region of Bryansk, according to Russia’s Ministry of Defence, after Washington lifted restrictions on their use against Russian targets.
- Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Ukraine’s use of the ATACMS marked a “new phase of the Western war” against Russia and Moscow will react “accordingly”.
- US President Joe Biden has approved providing antipersonnel land mines to Ukraine in what has been seen as another policy reversal on weapons provided to Kyiv by his outgoing administration, according to reports.
- The Pentagon will send Ukraine at least $275m in new weapons, The Associated Press news agency reported quoting US officials.
- The US embassy in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, has received information of a “potential significant air attack” on Wednesday and will be closed, the US Department of State Consular Affairs said in a post on social media platform X.
- Russia’s air defence systems destroyed 44 Ukrainian drones overnight, including 20 over the northwestern Novgorod region and 24 over several central and western regions, according to Russia’s Defence Ministry.
Diplomacy
- Russian President Vladimir Putin is open to discussing a Ukraine ceasefire deal with US President-elect Donald Trump but rules out making any major territorial concessions and insists Ukraine abandons ambitions to join NATO, the Reuters news agency reported.
- Ukraine has insisted that it will “never submit” in defending against Russia’s invasion and warned that the world must offer no appeasement to Putin, who formally approved lowering the threshold for Russia’s use of nuclear weapons. The document lays out that Russia could consider using nuclear weapons if it was subject to a conventional missile assault on it supported by a nuclear power.
- An emergency hotline between the Kremlin and the White House, created after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, is not currently in use, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russia’s state news agency TASS
- Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said it detained a German citizen on charges of sabotaging energy installations. The man was accused of involvement in an explosion at a gas distribution station in Kaliningrad in March this year, according to an FSB statement cited by state media.
