Here is the situation on Sunday, August 4, 2024.
Fighting
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Russian shelling of a residential area killed one person and injured two in the strategic logistical hub in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, the regional governor, Vadym Filashkin, said. Rescue workers were still dousing the flames as dazed residents looked on two hours after the impact, which police at the scene blamed on a UMPB D-30 glide bomb.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has praised his forces for hitting military targets inside Russia, after his army reported several strikes including the Morozovsk airfield in the Rostov region and a B-237 submarine in Russian-occupied Crimea.
- Kyiv said it had faced several missiles and 29 drones, out of which 24 drones were destroyed. Officials in the central region of Vinnytsia said the attacks damaged infrastructure, without giving more details. Zelenskyy earlier said that Russia launched more than 600 guided air bombs on Ukraine in the last week alone.
- Kherson regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said Ukrainian air defence shot down five drones over his region. Russian attacks on the region in the past day struck critical infrastructure, an administrative building and nine residential homes, he said.
- Mykolaiv regional governor Vitaliy Kim said one of the drones shot down by air defence caused a fire in outbuildings, which has since been extinguished, with no casualties reported.
Politics and diplomacy
- Senegal has summoned the Ukrainian ambassador over a video he published in support of recent deadly attacks against the Malian army and its Russian allies, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Senegalese Abroad said in a statement. The ministry said it maintains “constructive neutrality in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict”.
- Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza, freed this week from a 25-year prison sentence as part of a prisoner swap between Russia and the West, told journalists in Germany that many Russians were “opposed to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s war in Ukraine”.
- Ukraine’s human rights commissioner Dmytro Lubinets has urged the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the United Nations to probe an image widely shared online that he said likely showed a Ukrainian prisoner of war killed and dismembered by Russian forces. Andriy Kostin, Ukraine’s prosecutor general, said Russia “consistently repeats the crimes of the Nazis”.
Economy
- The US ratings agency S&P cut Ukraine’s credit rating to “selective default”, citing the war-torn country’s failure to make a coupon payment on an existing bond. S&P said it had downgraded Ukraine’s credit rating to “SD/SD” from “CC/C”, which means a very high level of default risk.
Sport
- Ukraine won their first gold medal of the Paris Olympics 2024 when their fencers triumphed in the women’s sabre team competition, beating South Korea 45-42 in the final at the Grand Palais. The victory was hailed in the war-torn country, with Zelenskyy declaring on social media that the gold showed “that Ukrainians are winning!”
