Here is the roundup of key events on Sunday, March 23.
Fighting
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At least three people, including a five-year-old child, were killed and several others injured after what Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko described as a “massive enemy drone attack” on the Ukrainian capital. The attack sparked fires in high-rise apartment buildings. Emergency services were dispatched to several districts of the city where fires were reported, he said.
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Russian shelling killed three people in the eastern Ukrainian town of Pokrovsk, one of the focal points of the advance westwards of Russian troops, regional Governor Vadym Filashkin said, adding that one person was also injured in Kramatorsk.
- A drone attack on a car in Russia’s southern region of Rostov killed one person, acting Governor Yury Slyusar said on Telegram.
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Russia’s Ministry of Defence said its air defence units destroyed 59 Ukrainian drones overnight. A total of 29 drones were destroyed over Rostov, 20 over the Astrakhan region and the rest over the Voronezh, Volgograd, Kursk and Saratov regions, as well as over Crimea.
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Authorities in southern Russia’s Krasnodar region brought in four firefighting trains loaded with water to help battle a blaze still raging at an oil depot at Kavkazskaya following a Ukrainian drone attack, regional officials said.
Politics and diplomacy
- President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has urged Ukraine’s allies to put fresh pressure on Moscow to end the war, after Russian drones targeted Kyiv overnight, killing at least three people, according to local authorities.
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Earlier, Zelenskyy met his top military commanders in Ukraine’s northeast as meetings with United States officials are due to begin in Saudi Arabia.
- Andrew Peek of the US National Security Council and Michael Anton of the US Department of State are heading to Saudi Arabia for talks with Ukrainian and Russian officials in the next two days.
- Moscow is hoping to achieve “some progress” at the talks, Senator Grigory Karasin, head of the Russian delegation, told state media before the US mediators meet Ukrainian and Russian representatives in a bid to halt the three-year conflict.
- Russian and US experts are due to discuss ways to ensure the safety of shipping in the Black Sea at the talks, the Kremlin said.
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Russia reserves the right to a “symmetrical response” to Ukrainian attacks on Russian energy facilities, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs warned, adding that “provocations” are being used to disrupt negotiations.
- South Korea’s Foreign Minister Cho Tae-yul said military cooperation between North Korea and Russia must stop, and Pyongyang should not be rewarded for its wrongdoings in the course of bringing about the end of the war in Ukraine.
