Ukraine’s offensive into the Russian border region of Kursk diverted about 40,000 Russian troops away from the frontline, Zelenskyy said on Thursday. Kyiv launched its Kursk offensive on 6 August in a bid to pull Moscow’s forces away from eastern Ukraine, where the Russian army has captured a string of villages in recent months.
Russia’s defence ministry said its forces had captured the village of Heorhiivka, east of the city of Kurakhove, in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. The General Staff of Ukraine’s military, in an afternoon report, referred to the village as one of several engulfed by fighting. Popular Ukrainian military blog DeepState said the village was in Russian hands. In his nightly video address, Zelenskyy said that Ukraine’s forces had “managed to diminish the occupiers’ assault potential in Donetsk region,” though the situation remained difficult in areas subjected to the heaviest attacks, near Kurakhove and another key Russian target, the city of Pokrovsk.
Russian forces hit a geriatric care home in the Ukrainian city of Sumy and targeted its energy sector in a new wave of airstrikes on Thursday, killing at least one civilian, Ukrainian officials said. During a daytime strike on the northern city, a Russian guided bomb hit a five-storey building, regional and military officials said. One person was killed and 12 wounded, the interior ministry said. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said rescue teams were checking to see whether people were trapped under rubble. Images from the site shared alongside the ministry’s post showed elderly patients evacuated from the damaged building lying on the ground on carpets and blankets.
The UN human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine said attacks on the power grid probably violated humanitarian law while the International Energy Agency said in a report that Ukraine’s electricity supply shortfall in the critical winter months could reach about a third of expected peak demand. Moscow has repeatedly attacked the Sumy region, which borders Russia’s Kursk region, the site of a major Ukrainian incursion in which Kyiv says it seized over 100 settlements.
Zelenskyy will meet Joe Biden and Kamala Harris at the White House next week in what is likely to be his last such visit before US elections that could upend Washington’s policy on Kyiv. Zelenskyy is expected to share a “victory plan” with the US leaders to end the war with Russia during the visit on 26 September – as Kyiv frets that a second Donald Trump presidency could loosen US commitment to Ukraine. In a separate announcement, Zelenskyy said he would also meet Trump.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the powerful leader of Russia’s Chechen Republic, accused Elon Musk on Thursday of disabling a Tesla Cybertruck that he claimed to have received from the billionaire last month. Kadyrov, who has ruled Chechnya with an iron fist for over 17 years, shared a video in August of him driving around in the electric vehicle with what appeared to be a machine gun mounted on its roof. Kadyrov said he received the vehicle from Musk, a claim that the Tesla owner called a lie on his social media platform, X. “Now, recently, Musk remotely disabled the Cybertruck,” said Kadyrov in a post on his Telegram account. It was not possible to independently verify Kadyrov’s claims.
The US imposed sanctions on Thursday on a network of five groups and one person for enabling payments between Russia and North Korea to support Moscow’s war in Ukraine and Pyongyang’s weapons programs, the Treasury Department said. The US and Ukraine, as well as independent analysts, say Pyongyang is helping Russia by supplying rockets and missiles in return for economic and other military assistance from Moscow.
Artillery shells sold by Indian arms makers have been diverted by European customers to Ukraine and New Delhi has not intervened to stop the trade despite protests from Moscow, according to 11 Indian and European government and defence industry officials, as well as a Reuters analysis of commercially available customs data. The transfer of munitions to support Ukraine’s defence against Russia has occurred for more than a year, according to the sources and the customs data.
Germany is set to approve close to 400m euros ($450m) in additional military aid to Ukraine, according to a finance ministry letter seen by Reuters on Thursday. The funds are in addition to about 8 billion euros budgeted for Ukraine in 2024.
Russia on Thursday opened the trial of an 18-year-old girl who stuck a 19th-century Ukrainian poem on a statue to protest Moscow’s offensive in Ukraine. Daria Kozyreva faces up to five years in prison. She was arrested in February for posting a verse from a poem by Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko, on a statue of him in St Petersburg. Elsewhere, a court jailed a student in the country’s Far East for almost two months on Thursday for making positive statements about a Ukrainian paramilitary unit that Moscow classifies as a “terrorist” group.
President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Russia was ramping up drone production by around ten times to nearly 1.4m this year to ensure victory in Ukraine. “In total, about 140,000 unmanned aerial vehicles of various types were delivered to the armed forces in 2023,” Putin said. “This year, the production of drones is planned to increase significantly. Well, to be more precise, almost 10 times.”
