Here is the situation on Tuesday, September 24, 2024.
Fighting
- At least one person was killed and five injured in the latest of a series of Russian attacks on Ukraine’s southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia, regional Governor Ivan Fedorov said. At least 23 people were hurt in Russian attacks on the city earlier in the day and over the course of Sunday night.
- Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said three people were killed and two injured in Ukrainian shelling of the village of Arkhangelskoe, about 5km (3 miles) from the border with Ukraine.
- Russia’s Foreign Ministry said at least 56 civilians had been killed and 266 injured in the seven weeks since Ukraine began its surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Heorhii Tykhyi said Ukraine abided by international humanitarian law and did not target civilians. He urged Russia to allow the United Nations and Red Cross access to the area to verify the situation.
Politics and diplomacy
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said “decisive action” by the United States now could hasten the end of Russian aggression against Ukraine. Zelenskyy is on a visit to the US and trying to secure approval to use Western-supplied longer-range weapons on military targets within Russia. He was speaking after a meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. He will meet President Joe Biden on Thursday.
- A commission set up by the UN Human Rights Council said that Russian prisons were deliberately withholding medical care for Ukrainian prisoners, with doctors in one prison even taking part in what it called “torture”. Commission chair Erik Mose told the council that torture had become a “common and acceptable practice”, with Russian authorities acting with “a sense of impunity”. Mose’s information was based on testimonies from former Ukrainian inmates at the Olenivka prison in Russian-occupied east Ukraine.
- Mariana Katzarova, the UN special rapporteur on the rights situation in Russia, told reporters in Geneva that the rights situation inside Russia has become “much worse” in the past year amid a tightening “state-sponsored system of fear and punishment”. Katzarova said there were an increasing number of arbitrary arrests and prison conditions had worsened. Russia currently has more than 1,300 political prisoners, she said.
- Katzarova also said there was evidence that Russian convicts who were pardoned or had their sentences cut so they could fight in Ukraine committed offences including rape and murder when they returned home from the front. An estimated 170,000 convicted violent criminals have been recruited to fight in Ukraine.
- Russia and Ukraine clashed at the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague in a long-running case about access to coastal waters around Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014.
Weapons
- European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said foreign ministers of the Group of Seven major democracies would discuss the issue of allowing Ukraine to use Western-supplied long-range missiles to hit deep inside Russian territory.
