Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,284

Here are the key events on day 1,284 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Here is how things stand on Sunday, August 31:

Fighting

• Russia launched “massive” strikes against Ukraine overnight on Saturday, with a total of 14 regions hit, according to Ukrainian officials.
• At least one person was killed and 30 others wounded in Ukraine’s Zaporizhia region, while residential buildings were hit and scores of homes left without gas or electricity. The cities of Dnipro and Pavlohrad in the central region of Dnipropetrovsk also came under attack early on Saturday, causing fires.
• Ukraine’s Air Force said it had downed 510 of 537 drones and 38 of 45 missiles launched by Russia in the overnight attack.
• In Ukraine’s Kherson, a 74-year-old man was also killed when Russian forces shelled the city, according to officials.
• The chief of Russia’s general staff, Valery Gerasimov, said that Russian forces are waging a nonstop offensive along almost the entire front line in Ukraine and have the “strategic initiative”.
• In a speech to his deputies, Gerasimov also said that Russian forces now control 99.7 percent of Ukraine’s Luhansk region, 79 percent of the Donetsk region, 74 percent of the Zaporizhia region and 76 percent of the Kherson region. He went on to claim that Russian troops have almost completely blockaded the city of Kupiansk, in the Kharkiv region, and control about half of its area.
• But Ukrainian military spokesperson Viktor Trehubov said that Kyiv’s forces had scored front-line successes, keeping Russian troops from seizing targets in the Donetsk region and halting further advances into the Dnipropetrovsk region. In one area, he said, Kyiv’s troops had surrounded Russian units.
• Ukraine’s military also claimed attacks in Russia, saying it had struck the Krasnodar and Syzran oil refineries overnight on Saturday, setting off fires at both facilities.
• Russia’s TASS state news agency also said that Ukrainian shelling left more than 17,000 people without power in the border town of Rylsk in Russia’s Kursk region.
• Kursk’s Acting Governor Alexander Khinshtein said that 201 bodies have been found in the Russian region since January 1, following Ukraine’s invasion of the Russian region, and that 590 people are still missing.

• Russia’s Ministry of Defence said that its forces shot down 233 Ukrainian drones, one guided bomb and four missiles in a 24-hour period, according to TASS.

Politics and Diplomacy

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has been pushing for a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, accused the Kremlin of using “the time meant for preparing a leaders’-level [peace] meeting to organise new massive attacks”, and called for more international sanctions on Moscow and its backers.
• Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke with Zelenskyy over the phone and reaffirmed his support for a peaceful settlement in Ukraine, saying that “India extends full support to all efforts” to restore peace and stability, according to a statement from New Delhi.
• The European Union’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said the bloc will examine how to use frozen Russian assets to fund Ukraine’s defence and reconstruction after the war. But confiscating the assets – which are worth 210 billion euros ($245.85bn) – now is not politically realistic, she said.
• Kallas’s comments come after some EU countries, including Estonia, Lithuania and Poland, called for the assets to be seized now and be used to support Kyiv. But EU heavyweights France and Germany – along with Belgium, which holds most of the assets – have rebuffed the idea.
• German Chancellor Friedrich Merz condemned Russia’s continuing attacks on Ukraine, saying that diplomatic efforts in recent weeks had been “answered with an even more aggressive approach by this regime in Moscow against the population in Ukraine”.
• “This will also not stop until we ensure together that Russia, at least for economic reasons, and perhaps also for military reasons … can no longer continue this war,” Merz added in comments at an event in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
• United States President Donald Trump outlined how his policy on Ukraine fits with his America First agenda, saying, “We’re not spending any money in the war”, describing this as a “big difference” in comparison with the “hundreds of billions of dollars” the US was previously spending.
• He also told The Daily Caller that the US will not send ground troops to Ukraine and that the US now sells equipment to NATO. “We don’t sell it to Ukraine. We sell it to NATO. They pay for the equipment,” Trump said.

Weapons

• Ukraine’s Defence Minister Denys Shmyhal announced that the US State Department had approved the sale of Patriot air defence systems for Ukraine for an estimated cost of $179.1m and satellite communications services worth $150m.