Here is the situation on Tuesday, September 17, 2024.
Fighting
- At least one person was injured and several homes damaged in a Russian drone attack on Ukraine’s Kyiv region, Governor Ruslan Kravchenko said.
- Ukraine’s Air Force said it shot down 53 of the 56 Russian drones that targeted the country’s central, northern and southern regions. Air defence units destroyed nearly 20 drones that were heading towards Kyiv itself, the military said.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, speaking in his nightly video address, said there had been 100 battles over the past 24 hours on the eastern front with the heaviest fighting in the Pokrovsk and Kurakhove sectors.
- Russia ordered the evacuation of settlements close to the Ukrainian border in the Kursk region and said it had retaken two villages – Uspenovka and Borki – Ukraine captured last month in a surprise cross-border incursion.
- Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha invited the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to visit the parts of Kursk it occupies to “prove [Ukraine’s] adherence to international humanitarian law”. The Kremlin said the move was a “provocation”.
Politics and diplomacy
- Laurent Vinatier, a 48-year-old French researcher arrested in Russia on charges of unlawfully collecting military information, pleaded guilty on the first day of his trial in Moscow. Russian state media said the guilty plea could mean a reduced sentence of about three years. Vinatier was arrested in June. France says he has been arbitrarily detained and has called for his immediate release.
- The US Attorney’s office in Boston said it had charged Sam Bhambhani and Maxim Teslenko with illegal smuggling and conspiring to violate export controls by selling equipment to Russia’s nuclear energy industry. Bhambhani was arrested on September 9 and released following a court appearance. Moscow-based Teslenko remains at large overseas.
- Ukraine added Russian-Canadian filmmaker Anastasia Trofimova, the director of a controversial war documentary, to its national security blacklist. Ukraine says her film Russians at War, which features interviews with soldiers fighting on the front line in Ukraine, spread “Russian propaganda” about Moscow’s invasion.
- Russia charged two more military officers with taking bribes, investigators said on Monday, the latest in a string of arrests linked to alleged corruption in the Ministry of Defence.
Weapons
- Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian said that his government had not transferred any weapons to Russia since it took office in August. The United States and its allies accused Iran last week of transferring ballistic missiles to Russia for use in its war in Ukraine.
- Outgoing NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said he welcomed talks on Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles to strike military targets inside Russian territory, but any decision on the weapons’ use would have to be made by countries individually.
