Here is the situation on Monday, March 11, 2024.
Fighting
- Three people were killed in Russian shelling and drone attacks on towns in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, while at least a dozen people were injured in a Russian missile attack in the early hours of Sunday morning on the town of Myrnohrad, about 40km (25 miles) from the front line in Donetsk.
- Kyiv said Russia launched 39 Iranian-made Shahed attack drones across central and southern regions, including the Kyiv region. The Air Force said 35 were shot down over 10 regions. It did not say whether there was any damage.
- St Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport was closed briefly after a Ukrainian drone was detected in the neighbouring Leningrad region. The Russian Defence Ministry said the drone was shot down. There were no reports of damage or casualties.
Politics and diplomacy
- Ukraine rejected Pope Francis’s call to “raise the white flag” and hold negotiations with Russia saying that Kyiv will “never” surrender. “Our flag is a yellow and blue one. This is the flag by which we live, die, and prevail. We shall never raise any other flags,” Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote on social media.
- Ukraine’s chief prosecutor Andriy Kostin told the AFP news agency that his office had logged about 123,000 alleged war crimes by Russia since it began its invasion in February 2022, and identified 511 suspects. Kostin said Russia must answer the accusations in court. “Russia must be defeated on the battlefield and in the courtroom,” he said.
- A Moscow court sentenced a Moscow State University student to 10 days in prison after he renamed his WiFi network “Slava Ukraini” (Glory to Ukraine). The court found him guilty of a “public demonstration of Nazi symbolics… or symbols of extremist organisations,” Ria-Novosti reported.
Weapons
- European states imported almost double the amount of arms in 2019 to 2023 compared with 2014 to 2018, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), a leading conflict think tank, as Ukraine emerged as Europe’s largest arms importer. SPRI said European imports grew by 94 percent between 2019 and 2023 compared with 2014 to 2018, while Ukraine became the fourth largest importer in the world between 2019 to 2023.
