Here are the key events on day 1,258 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Here is how things stand on Tuesday, August 5:
Fighting
- Three people were killed in a Russian attack on the Stepnohirsk community in Ukraine’s Zaporizhia region, the local military administration said on Telegram. Russia launched 405 attacks on 10 settlements in the region in the past day, the administration said on Monday.
- Russian drone attacks killed three people in the Chuhuiv district of Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, the regional prosecutor’s office said. The victims included a man killed when Russian drones caused a fire in his home in the village of Losivka, and a man and a woman who were riding a motorcycle when they were killed. The prosecutor’s office said it was investigating the motorcycle attack as a possible war crime.
- Russian attacks across Ukraine’s Kherson region killed one person and damaged homes, cars and a gas pipeline, Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said. A man who was injured by artillery shelling on the town of Beryslav on July 27 also passed away due to his injuries, Prokudin added.
- Russian attacks killed one person in Dobropillya city in the Pokrovsky region and another person in Kostiantynivka city, in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, Donetsk Governor Vadym Filashkin said.
- Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) claimed that Ukrainian drones hit five Russian fighter jets at Saky airfield in Russian-occupied Crimea, destroying one of them.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that mercenaries from China, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and African countries are fighting with Russian forces in the Vovchansk area of Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine.
- Ukraine’s general staff acknowledged that it was responsible for a drone attack that caused a fire at a fuel depot of Sochi airport in southern Russia on Sunday.
Military aid
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- The Netherlands will contribute 500 million euros ($578m) to buy US military equipment for Ukraine, including Patriot air defence system parts and missiles. The purchase will make the Netherlands the first country to participate in a new scheme where NATO countries fund US weapons to send to Kyiv.
Sanctions
- India’s Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said in a statement that the United States and European Union’s “targeting” of the nation for importing oil from Russia after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was “unjustified and unreasonable”.
- Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff at the White House, said earlier on Fox News: “What he [US President Donald Trump] said very clearly is that it is not acceptable for India to continue financing this war by purchasing the oil from Russia.”
- Trump said he would “substantially” increase tariffs on India for what he said was the buying and reselling of “massive amounts” of Russian oil “for big profits”.
Ceasefire talks
- Trump said his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, would again visit Russia to continue talks on its war in Ukraine.
Politics and diplomacy
- Russian Former President Dmitry Medvedev said that Moscow’s abandonment of a moratorium on medium- and short-range nuclear missiles was “the result of NATO countries’ anti-Russian policy”, in a post on X.
- The trial has begun in the March 22, 2024, shooting attack in a Moscow concert hall that killed 149 people. Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed, without providing evidence, that Ukraine was involved in the attack, an allegation Kyiv vehemently denies.
Corruption
- Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau said in a statement that it had charged six people, including a lawmaker and a government official, involved in “systematically misappropriat[ing] funds allocated by local authorities for defence needs”, including funds meant for the purchase of drones and jamming equipment for the military.