Here is the situation on Wednesday May 29, 2024.
Fighting
- Regional Governor Vadym Filashkin said at least two people were killed after Russian guided bombs struck apartment buildings in the eastern Ukrainian city of Toretsk, which lies to the north of the Russian-occupied regional centre of Donetsk. Filashkin said rescue teams were on site to determine the extent of the casualties, posting photos of the destructions. Donetsk regional prosecutors said a third guided bomb struck Oleksievo-Druzhkivka, a town northwest of Toretsk, injuring six people.
- The governor of Ukraine’s southern Kherson region said one person was killed in Russian shelling of a village north of the city of Kherson.
- Ukraine’s military said Russian forces had launched 25 assaults along the 1,200km (750-mile) front line, with the heaviest fighting in the Pokrovsk sector, northwest of Donetsk.
Politics and diplomacy
- Russian President Vladimir Putin warned of “serious consequences”, and stressed his country’s nuclear strength, if Ukraine’s Western allies allowed weapons supplied to Kyiv to be used to attack targets inside Russia. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told The Economist in an interview last week that alliance members should let Ukraine strike deep into Russia with Western weapons, a view supported by some NATO members but not by the United States. Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and currently occupies about 18 percent of the country.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Putin would applaud Joe Biden’s absence if the US president did not attend Kyiv’s Swiss peace summit next month. Switzerland has invited more than 160 delegations and the US has said it will send an official, but not their identity.
- Poland’s Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski told the Gazeta Wyborcza daily that Warsaw should not exclude the possibility of sending troops to Ukraine and should keep Putin guessing about whether such a decision would ever be made.
Weapons
- Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov told the Reuters news agency that the country will receive its first supplies of F-16 fighter jets “very soon”, but that about half of its desperately needed foreign military aid was arriving late, at a time when Russia was intensifying its front-line campaign with more troops and more equipment.
- Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said a Czech-led initiative to speed up ammunition deliveries to Ukraine had raised 1.6 billion euros ($1.74bn), and the first deliveries of 155 mm (calibre) ammunition would arrive there in a matter of days.
- Portugal will provide military support to Ukraine worth at least 126 million euros ($137m) this year under a security pact signed in Lisbon between Ukrainian President Zelenskyy and Portuguese Prime Minister Luis Montenegro.
