Here is the situation as it stands on Sunday, November 20:
Fighting
- Russia has reached agreement with Iran to begin manufacturing hundreds of unmanned weaponised aircraft on Russian soil, The Washington Post reported.
- Ukrainian electricity supplies are under control despite Russian attacks on power-generating infrastructure and there is no need to panic, the energy ministry said.
- Five people were wounded in a Russian air strike on a humanitarian station where bread was being distributed in the town of Bilozerka, just west of Kherson city, a senior aide to the presidency said.
- Russia’s surge in missile strikes in Ukraine is partly designed to exhaust Kyiv’s supplies of air defences and finally achieve dominance of the skies, a senior US military official said.
- About 60 Russian soldiers were killed in a long-range Ukrainian artillery attack last week, Kyiv said, the second time in four days that Ukraine claimed to have inflicted significant casualties in a single incident.
- At least 437 Ukrainian children have been killed as a result of Russia’s invasion, according to Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office.
- Russia urged international organisations to condemn the alleged execution of 11 Russian prisoners of war by Ukrainian soldiers.
- Ukraine’s military said it was checking the authenticity of footage that Moscow described as surrendering Russian soldiers being executed after videos circulated on Russian social media showing the bodies of Russian troops.
- Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address that energy supply problems in the country were worst in and around Kyiv, as well as in six other regions, adding work was continuing “to stabilise the situation”.
Kherson region
- Ukraine will soon begin evacuating people who want to leave the recently liberated southern city of Kherson and the surrounding areas, a senior official announced, citing damage done by Russian forces.
- The first train from the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, arrived in Kherson a week after Russian troops pulled out from the southern city.
- Hundreds of people were detained or went missing in Kherson region while it was under Russian control, and dozens may have been tortured, Yale University researchers concluded in a report. Russia has denied its forces have committed abuses.
Diplomacy
- The West’s attempts to persuade Ukraine to negotiate with Moscow, after a series of major military victories by Kyiv, are “bizarre” and amount to asking for its capitulation, a key adviser to the Ukrainian president said.
- Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has offered a preview of “a possible world of tyranny and turmoil”, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said.
- British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced a new air defence package worth $60m as he met Zelenskyy during his first trip to Kyiv since becoming prime minister.
- Peace in Ukraine will only be possible if the country’s 1991 borders are restored, a senior aide to Zelenskyy said.
