Here is the situation on Friday 24 May 2024.
Battler
- At least seven people were killed and dozens more injured in a Russian missile attack on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city and home to about a million people.
- Nearly 11,000 people have been forced from their homes in the Kharkiv region since Russian forces began a cross-border ground offensive on May 10, Governor Oleh Syniehubov said.
- Vyacheslav Gladkov, governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, said a woman was killed after a destroyed Ukrainian drone fell on her house. The Russian Defense Ministry said 35 Ukrainian rockets and three drones were shot down over the Belgorod region, which lies across the border from Kharkiv.
- The Russian Defense Ministry said its forces had recaptured the small village of Andriivka in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. The Ukrainian General Staff later said that its troops were repelling three Russian assaults in the Andriivka area and nearby Novyi. Andriivka was liberated by Ukrainian soldiers during an offensive last September.
- Sergei Aksyonov, head of the Russian-annexed Crimean peninsula, said two people were killed in a Ukrainian missile attack near Simferopol, the main administrative center of the peninsula. Ukraine has not commented on the alleged attack. Russia invaded and annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.
- Russia said it shot down a Ukrainian drone in the central region of Tatarstan, hundreds of kilometers from the border between the two countries.
Politics and diplomacy
- Russia has arrested Lieutenant General Vadim Shamarin, deputy chief of the Russian General Staff and a senior defense official on charges of bribery and “abuse of power” as part of a widening crackdown on corruption in military contracts. The two are detained awaiting trial.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin has arrived in Belarus, Moscow’s closest ally, for talks with President Alexander Lukashenko that are expected to focus on security and military exercises involving tactical nuclear weapons.
- Putin signed a decree allowing the confiscation of assets inside Russia belonging to the United States, its citizens and its companies, to be used as compensation for Western sanctions against Moscow.
- Russia has jailed 36-year-old barman Vladimir Malina for 25 years for joining a unit of Russians fighting for Ukraine and sabotaging railway equipment.
- Russia has jailed 20-year-old student Vladimir Belkovich, from the Siberian region of Irkutsk, for 13 years in prison for treason after he agreed to publish leaflets on behalf of a pro-Ukrainian partisan group.
- Thirteen Ukrainian children have returned home from Russia and Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories with the cooperation of Qatar, officials in Kiev said. Ukraine says around 20,000 Ukrainian children were sent to Russia without the consent of their families or guardians.
- OVD-Info, a major Russian rights group and protest monitoring network, said it had received a notice from YouTube threatening to block access in Russia to one of its video channels featuring news about the war in Ukraine.
Weapons
- Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba once again called on the country’s Western allies to send seven Patriot air defense systems. “They are needed now, not tomorrow,” he said.
- The United States is preparing a new $275 million military aid package for Ukraine, which will include High Mobility Artillery Missile Systems (HIMARS), as well as high-demand 155 mm and 105 mm artillery shells, anti-tank systems Javelins and AT-4s, anti-tank mines, tactical vehicle weapons and small arms.
- Russian jamming prevented many of Ukraine’s relatively new long-range glide bombs from hitting their intended targets, Reuters reported, citing three people familiar with the challenges.
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