Here is the situation on Monday, August 19, 2024.
Fighting
- Ukraine has ordered the “forced evacuation” of families with children from Pokrovsk, as Russian forces have been inching towards the eastern city for months. Donetsk governor Vadym Filashkin said more than 53,000 people live in the area, including almost 4,000 children. Filashkin called the decision to evacuate “necessary and inevitable.”
- Ukrainian Air Force commander Mykola Oleshchuk said the air force destroyed a second strategically important bridge over the Seym River in the Kursk region. He posted an aerial video of a blast tearing through the bridge, which appeared to be near the village of Zvannoye, about 15km (nine miles) north of the Ukrainian border.
- Vasily Golubev, the governor of Russia’s southern Rostov region, said falling debris from a Ukrainian drone attack triggered a large fire at an oil storage facility in the town of Proletarsk. There were no reports of injuries. Ukraine acknowledged the attack.
- Russia’s Ministry of Defence said its forces took control of the village of Svyrydonivka, about 15km (nine miles) from the key town of Pokrovsk in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.
- The military administration in Kyiv said Russia carried out its third ballistic missile attack on the Ukrainian capital this month but initial data suggested the weapons were shot down on approach. Separately, the air force’s Oleshchuk said eight Russian attack drones and five out of eight missiles launched across the country, including Kyiv, were destroyed.
- Zelenskyy said Russia had launched more than 40 missiles, 750 guided aerial bombs and 200 attack drones in the past week against Ukrainian villages and cities.
- International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Rafael Grossi said that safety at Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant was deteriorating following a drone strike that hit a perimeter access road on Saturday.
- Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko claimed Kyiv had stationed more than 120,000 soldiers along its border with Belarus and told the state news agency that he had deployed a third of all Belarusian soldiers to the border. Andriy Demchenko, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian border service, told Ukrainian media outlet Ukrainska Pravda that the situation on the Belarus border had not changed.
Politics and diplomacy
- Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said it was “clear” that the United States had ordered the 2022 attacks on the Nord Stream gas pipelines. In an interview with the Izvestia news outlet, Lavrov added: “There was a command from the very top, as they say, the very top for the West is, of course, Washington.”
- Russia has complained to Germany over its investigation into the 2022 explosions that ruptured the Nord Stream gas pipelines, RIA news agency reported, after a key suspect escaped arrest in Poland. German media had reported that German prosecutors had identified a Ukrainian diving instructor as a major suspect in attack and issued a warrant to arrest him in Poland.
- The Kremlin said Monday it “will not talk” to Ukraine given its incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov told the Russian Shot Telegram channel, that “at the moment it would be completely inappropriate to enter into a negotiating process”.
- North Korea condemned Ukraine’s August 6 incursion into Russia’s Kursk region as an “act of terror” and said it would always stand with Russia, according to state media.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Azerbaijan’s capital Baku for a two-day state visit, according to Russian news agencies. Putin will hold talks with Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev on bilateral relations and “international and regional problems”, the Kremlin said.
