Here is the situation on Saturday, May 4, 2024.
Fighting
- France estimates that 150,000 Russian soldiers have been killed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Foreign Minister Stephane Sejourne said in an interview.
- Russia says it downed four US-made long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS), recently supplied by the United States to Ukraine, over the occupied Crimean peninsula.
- Two people have been killed in a Russian attack on the city of Kurakhove, located in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. Two other people were also reported wounded.
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Russia has launched an overnight drone attack on Ukraine’s Kharkiv and Dnipro regions, injuring at least six people, including three women and a child, and hitting critical infrastructure, commercial and residential buildings.
- The Ukrainian Air Force says Russian forces launched 13 Iran-made Shahed drones targeting the regions in the northeast and centre of the country, but its air defence units downed all of them.
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At least one person was severely injured and private houses and infrastructure facilities were damaged in Ukraine’s central Kirovohrad region as a result of a Russian missile attack, according to a local official.
- Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) says it has killed a man allegedly recruited by Ukraine to blow up military buildings and energy sites in the country, state media reported. The purported plans included the targeting of “defence ministry facilities in the Moscow region and against members of a volunteer battalion and a volunteer centre in Saint Petersburg”.
Politics
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The Kremlin has called British Foreign Secretary David Cameron’s statement that Ukraine could use British weapons against targets inside Russia if it wanted to, as a direct and dangerous escalation of tensions around the conflict.
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Cameron has promised 3 billion pounds ($3.7bn) of annual military aid for Ukraine for “as long as it takes”.
- Russia has slammed new comments by French President Emmanuel Macron in which he repeated that the possibility of sending ground troops to Ukraine should not be ruled out. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters that the statement “is very important and very dangerous”.
- Russia has accused the US of using the threat of secondary sanctions against Chinese businesses engaging with it as a “pretext” to try and contain China. Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Maria Zakharova says China’s economy “irritates the US to an extreme degree”, so it is using the sanctions “to hold onto [its] economic leadership”.
- A Russian military court has extended the detentions of a theatre director and a playwright by six months in a case that has shaken the already diminished theatre community. Director Yevgeniya Berkovich and writer Svetlana Petriychuk were arrested a year ago, accused of “justifying terrorism” in an award-winning play performed several years ago.
Economy
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Ukraine’s central bank has introduced its largest wartime currency liberalisation measures aimed at easing restrictions for businesses, more than two years after Russia’s invasion prompted the imposition of tough restrictions.
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Most of the new provisions, which will take effect on May 14, include the lifting of currency restrictions on imports of goods and services, as well as the easing of restrictions on transferring foreign currency from representative offices to parent companies.
- Central bank governor Andriy Pyshnyi, writing on Facebook, described the moves as a “very tangible step” that would provide businesses with “opportunities to enter new markets or bring in investments”.
- Ukraine’s economy, bolstered by financial aid from its Western partners, posted 5.3 percent growth last year and is forecast to expand by 3 percent this year, a reversal from 2022 when the economy shrank by about a third in the first year of the war.
