Russia-Ukraine War: List of Key Events, Today 907 | Russia-Ukraine War News

As the war enters its 907th day, here are the main developments.

Here is the situation on Tuesday, August 20, 2024.

Fighting

• Russia said Ukraine had attacked the third and final bridge across the Seim River in the Kursk region, where Kyiv carried out a surprise cross-border incursion on August 6.
• In his first comments on the offensive’s aims, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the aim of the offensive was to create a “buffer zone” and limit Russia’s ability to launch long-range attacks on Ukraine. He later added that Ukrainian forces controlled more than 1,250 square kilometres (483 square miles) of territory and 92 settlements in the Kursk region.
• Ukraine has ordered families with children to leave the town of Pokrovsk in the eastern Donetsk region immediately as Russian forces advance. About 53,000 people are believed to still be living there.
• In a sign of the intensity of the fighting on the Pokrovsk front, the Ukrainian military said its forces were involved in 63 skirmishes on Monday around Pokrovsk and 21 in the Toretsk region. Some fighting continued into the night, the military said.
• Meanwhile, the Russian Defense Ministry said its forces had captured the town of Zalizny near Toretsk. Zalizny was home to about 5,000 people before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
• Ukraine said at least four people were killed in Russian attacks on Toretsk and Zarekhny, another settlement on the front line.
• At least one woman was killed and 10 people were wounded after Ukrainian artillery fire hit a bus station in the city of Donetsk, Denis Pushilin, the governor of the Russian-occupied Donetsk region, said.
• More than 40 Russian firefighters were injured while battling a blaze that broke out days ago at an oil facility that was hit by a Ukrainian drone, the governor of the southern Russian region of Rostov said. Eighteen of the firefighters were being treated in hospital and five were in intensive care, Golubev said.
• The World Health Organization’s European branch said it had recorded a total of 1,940 attacks on health care facilities in Ukraine since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion.

Politics and Diplomacy

• Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is scheduled to visit Ukraine on Friday and meet Zelensky. It will be the first visit by an Indian leader in more than 30 years. Modi visited Moscow last month and met Russian President Vladimir Putin.
• Russia has complained to Germany about its investigation into the 2022 explosions that ruptured the Nord Stream gas pipeline after a key suspect escaped arrest in Poland despite a German arrest warrant. The suspect, a Ukrainian diver, had left Poland before he was arrested.
• Russia has banned a number of “hostile” British think tanks and 32 of their staff. The list includes the leading foreign affairs think tank Chatham House, as well as the Aga Khan Foundation.
• Russian prosecutors said they had designated the Clooney Foundation for Justice, a U.S. nonprofit, as an “undesirable” organization for carrying out “Hollywood-scale” work to discredit Moscow. The foundation was founded by actor George Clooney and his wife, human rights lawyer Amal Clooney.
• Belarus has deployed aircraft and air defense forces to its border with Ukraine, a day after President Alexander Lukashenko said he would deploy nearly a third of the country’s military along the frontier.