Here is the situation on Tuesday, April 16, 2024.
Fighting
- At least two people were killed after a Russian guided aerial bomb hit an education centre in the village of Lukiantsi in the northeastern Kharkiv region.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy issued a new plea to Ukraine’s allies for air defences to protect against Russian strikes on cities and infrastructure and noted that Ukraine’s forces were facing difficult situations along the eastern front line in Chasiv Yar, west of the destroyed Russian-held town of Bakhmut, and in Pokrovsk and Kupiansk, further west and north.
Politics and diplomacy
- International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Rafael Grossi told the United Nations Security Council that “reckless attacks” on the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power plant in Ukraine had put the world “dangerously close to a nuclear accident”. Russia and Ukraine have blamed each other for the incidents over the last week but Grossi said it was “impossible” at the moment to prove who was behind them.
- Senior officials in the United States accused China of supporting Russia’s war effort in Ukraine by providing drone and missile technology, satellite imagery and machine tools. The Chinese Embassy in the US said it has not provided weaponry to any party and that it was “not a producer of or party involved in the Ukraine crisis”.
- US House Speaker Mike Johnson said the House of Representatives would consider aid to Ukraine and Israel as separate pieces of legislation this week. Some $60bn in assistance to Ukraine, which was passed by the Senate as a single bill alongside aid for Israel and Taiwan, has been blocked by Republicans for weeks.
- A Russian military court jailed a 29-year-old man for 14 years after he was found guilty of cooperating with a foreign state and “justifying terrorism”. Vladlen Menshikov was initially accused of attempting to sabotage railway lines carrying military equipment near his hometown of Rezh, a small village near the Urals city of Yekaterinburg.
- The US imposed sanctions on 12 Belarus entities and 10 individuals over what it said was their support for Russia’s war on Ukraine.
- A ballet performance in South Korea featuring principal dancers from Russia’s Bolshoi Ballet was cancelled a day before opening night, the organiser said. The last-minute cancellation came after Seoul performances of a ballet starring Svetlana Zakharova, a Ukrainian-born Russian prima ballerina and vocal supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin, were called off in March.
Weapons
- Colonel Vadym Sukharevskyi, the commander of Ukraine’s drone forces, said Ukraine had delivered three times more drones to its army so far this year than in the whole of 2023.
- Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba appealed for “extraordinary and bold steps” to supply air defences to help Ukraine defend itself against waves of Russian air strikes. “We urgently require additional Patriot and other modern air defence systems, weapons and ammunition,” Kuleba told a Black Sea security conference via videolink.
