As the war enters its 896th day, these are the main developments.

Published On 9 Aug 20249 Aug 2024

Here is the situation on Friday, August 9, 2024.

Fighting

• Fierce battles continued in Russia’s southwestern Kursk region, after some 1,000 Ukrainian troops launched a cross-border raid supported by tanks and armoured vehicles early on August 6.
• Officials said about 3,000 people were evacuated from the area, which is under a local state of emergency.
• Russia’s Ministry of Defence said its troops were “continuing to destroy” armed Ukrainian units and were using air strikes, rockets and artillery fire to try to push them back. It said it had rushed in reserves and was “thwarting attempts to break through” deeper into the Kursk region.
• Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said Russia’s “unequivocal aggression” was the reason for any “escalation, shelling, military actions, forced evacuations, and destruction of normal life forms, including within [Russia’s] own territories like Kursk and Belgorod regions”.
• “Russia brought the war to our land and should feel what it has done,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his evening address to the nation, without referring directly to the offensive. He also praised the Ukrainian army for its ability “to surprise” and achieve results, but again did not explicitly reference the situation in Kursk.
• A young man and his six-year-old brother were killed when a Russian guided bomb hit a schoolyard in the village of Mohrytsia in Ukraine’s Sumy region, just across the border from Kursk, Volodymyr Artiukh, head of the Sumy region’s military administration, told national TV. “Sumy region has never known such a large number per day,” he said of the 56 guided bombs dropped over the previous 24 hours.
• At least four people were killed and 11 injured in Russian attacks on Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, according to local governor Vadym Filashkin. Two people were killed when a residential district of Kostiantynivka, west of Bakhmut, was hit by shelling. Two more were killed and 11 injured in an attack on Selydove, a town to the southwest. The attack also damaged multiple apartment blocks and administrative buildings.

• A 12-year-old boy was injured and two homes damaged in Russian attacks on the central Dnipropetrovsk region, Governor Serhiy Lysak said.
• One man was killed and another injured in Ukrainian shelling of Shebekino in Russia’s Belgorod region, Vyacheslav Gladkov, the regional governor, wrote on his Telegram channel.

Politics and diplomacy

• Andriy Yermak, Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, said that while Moscow might attend the next Kyiv-led peace summit, it should not be treated as the start of negotiations with Russia.
• Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said Niger’s decision to follow Mali and cut ties with Kyiv was “regrettable”.
• A court in southern Russia sentenced Ukrainian Tetiana Klyuchko to 12 years in a penal colony after she was found guilty of participating in a “terrorist” group and attempting to commit an “act of terror” in a part of Ukraine’s Zaporizhia region occupied by Russia.
• A Moscow-controlled court in Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region, which is almost entirely occupied by Russia, jailed Ukrainian Yuriy Galetsky for 13 years after finding him guilty of espionage for sharing information on troop movements.

Weapons

• Ukraine gave a demonstration of a new robot dog “BAD One” that it might soon use for more dangerous missions on the front line.

Source: Al Jazeera and news agencies