Here is the situation on Friday, March 15, 2024.
Fighting
- One person was killed and three injured after a Russian drone struck a residential building in the southwestern Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia.
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Russia attacked several Ukrainian regions with 36 drones, hitting civilian infrastructure and knocking out television and radio signals in the northeastern Sumy and Kharkiv regions. Air defences destroyed 22 of the drones. Five were shot down over the southern Mykolaiv and southeastern Dnipropetrovsk regions, local officials said.
- Andriy Yusov, a spokesperson for the GUR intelligence directorate, said armed groups of Russians opposed to the Kremlin were pressing an incursion into Russian territory and had turned the Kursk and Belgorod border regions into “active combat zones”. Russia’s National Guard (Rosgvardia) said it was repelling attacks by pro-Ukrainian armed groups near the village of Tyotkino in the Kursk region.
- Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said two people were killed and nine injured in Ukrainian air attacks on villages in the region.
Politics and diplomacy
- Visiting the United States, the EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said the coming months of the war would be “decisive”, and urged US lawmakers to quickly approve new aid for Ukraine. “Many analysts expect a major Russian offensive this summer, and Ukraine cannot wait until the result of the next US elections,” he said.
- German Chancellor Olaf Scholz assured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Kyiv’s international partners would cooperate closely on military support. Scholz, French President Emmanuel Macron and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk are due to meet in Berlin on Friday to discuss aid for Ukraine.
- Russians go to the polls on Friday in a presidential election that is expected to see Vladimir Putin returned to power for a fifth term. Kyiv said voting in the partly Russian-occupied regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson as well as Crimea, which Russia invaded and annexed in 2014, was “illegal and void”.
- Russia’s FSB security service said it arrested four alleged members of a pro-Ukraine paramilitary group in Saint Petersburg who were preparing attacks on Russian territory, including poisoning Russian soldiers.
- US ambassador to Hungary, David Pressman, said NATO members have warned Hungary of the dangers of its “close and expanding” relationship with Russia.
- Lithuanian counter-intelligence said this week’s hammer attack in Vilnius on Leonid Volkov, an exiled top aide to late Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, was the work of Russian special services.
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Russia banned 227 US citizens from entering the country, including State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller and former US ambassador to Russia John Sullivan.
Weapons
- NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Ukraine was running out of ammunition, and NATO members were not doing enough to help Kyiv replenish its supplies. “Ukraine needs even more support, and they need it now,” he told reporters in Brussels.
- German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall said it plans to set up at least four factories in Ukraine to produce shells, military vehicles, gunpowder and anti-aircraft weapons, as it targets a record 10 billion euros ($10.9bn) in sales this year.
