Here is the situation on Tuesday, April 30, 2024.
Fighting
- At least four people were killed and 32 more injured after a Russian missile attack on the Ukrainian port city of Odesa, which struck a law academy in a popular seafront park. Governor Oleh Kiper said seven of the injured, including a four-year-old child, were in serious condition.
- One person was injured by shrapnel in the blast of a Russian missile attack on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-biggest city.
- Russia said it captured the village of Semenivka northwest of the strategic town of Avdiivka, as Ukraine’s army said its troops had repelled enemy attacks near the settlement. The announcement came a day after Moscow claimed the nearby village of Novobakhmutivka, with Kyiv saying the situation for its front line forces was worsening.
Politics and diplomacy
- German prosecutors said they were not ruling out a political motive as they investigated a 57-year-old Russian citizen arrested on suspicion of stabbing to death two convalescing Ukrainian soldiers over the weekend. The soldiers – who had been recuperating in southern Germany – were found with serious stab wounds outside a shopping centre in the Bavarian town of Murnau am See on Saturday evening.
- A 54-year-old German former soldier named only as Thomas H admitted he had spied for Russia as he went on trial for espionage in the western city of Duesseldorf. The trial is expected to continue until late June.
- Chinese President Xi Jinping will make a state visit to France on May 6 and 7 with the war in Ukraine high on the agenda. French President Emmanuel Macron has been trying to dissuade China from supporting Russia’s offensive.
- Polish farmers ended their protest over cheap food imports at the last border crossing with Ukraine after months of diplomacy between Kyiv and Warsaw as well as and Poland’s decision to pay subsidies to farmers as compensation for lower grain prices.
Weapons
- Visiting Kyiv, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg acknowledged months-long delays in US military aid to Ukraine had had “serious consequences on the battlefield“, but promised members were now working hard to meet Ukraine’s “urgent needs”.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, speaking alongside Stoltenberg at a press conference, said while weapons had begun to arrive in Ukraine in “small amounts”, the process needed to be accelerated.
- The debris from a missile that struck Kharkiv on January 2 was from a North Korean Hwasong-11 series ballistic missile, United Nations sanctions monitors told a UN Security Council committee in a report seen by the Reuters news agency.
