Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,281

Here are the key events on day 1,281 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Here is how things stand on Thursday, August 28:

Fighting

• Ukraine’s capital Kyiv has come under a large-scale night-time attack by Russia, officials said early on Thursday, with at least one dead, four injured and damage to buildings in several districts of the city, including a kindergarten.
• Russian troops have entered the villages of Novoheorhiivka and Zaporizke in the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, a major Ukrainian industrial centre next to the Donetsk region, The Associated Press (AP) news agency reported, citing a local commander.
• Strikes across Ukraine on Wednesday killed three people and left more than 100,000 households without power, officials in Kyiv said.
• Ukraine’s Ministry of Energy said Russian attacks were launched against energy and gas transport infrastructure facilities in six regions, in what it called a “deliberate policy of destroying Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure on the eve of the heating season”.
• Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said more than 100,000 houses were cut off from electricity in the Poltava, Sumy and Chernihiv regions following Russian attacks.
• A farm in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region was damaged as a result of heavy shelling, killing two employees, and an 81-year-old woman died in an overnight attack on the regional capital, local officials said.
• Ukraine is looking at how to share battlefield data with its allies, said Mykhailo Fedorov, who heads Ukraine’s digitalisation ministry, adding, “The data we have is priceless for any country.”
• Fedorov also said he was confident of a solution to continue Poland’s funding of 30,000 Starlink internet systems for Ukraine, after Poland said it might no longer be able to pay for them following a presidential veto. Poland is the biggest donor of SpaceX’s satellite internet devices to Ukraine, which it uses across the front line as a crucial communication tool resistant to Russian hacking and jamming.

Peace talks

• President Zelenskyy said he saw “very arrogant and negative signals from Moscow regarding the negotiations” on an end to the war with Russia, and called for “pressure” to be exerted to “force Russia to take real steps” towards peace.
• Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rebuffed demands for swift peace talks, saying Russian President Vladimir Putin had many priorities, including embarking on an unprecedented trip to China and preparing for an economic forum in the city of Vladivostok, in the Russian Far East.
• Peskov also pushed back against the idea of European peacekeeping troops being deployed to Ukraine, saying: “We view such discussions negatively.” He said it was “exactly this movement of NATO military infrastructure … into Ukraine” that Russia sees as one of the “root causes” of the war.

Politics and diplomacy

• Ukraine has criticised Russia for setting out plans to withdraw from the Council of Europe’s treaty for the prevention of torture, saying the proposal was a tacit admission of guilt by Moscow. Ukrainian officials have long accused Russia of war crimes and torturing Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war.
• Zelenskyy signed a decree appointing Olha Stefanishyna, a former top cabinet minister, as Ukraine’s next ambassador to the United States. Zelenskyy said “Ukraine’s long-term security depends on relations with America” and singled out the US provision of weapons for Ukraine and the supplying of Ukrainian drones to the US as diplomatic priorities.
• Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, said he was in the Saudi Arabian capital Riyadh along with security council chief Rustem Umerov in advance of talks later in the week with US administration officials in New York.

Regional security

• Germany has launched a drive to attract more people into voluntary military service as the country scrambles to strengthen its armed forces in the face of growing fears about Russian aggression.
• German weapons-maker Rheinmetall opened Europe’s largest munitions plant on Wednesday, a move hailed as boosting Western defences by NATO chief Mark Rutte. “This is absolutely crucial for our own security and also to keep supporting Ukraine in its fight today and to deter any aggression in the future,” Rutte said at an opening ceremony.
• Romania has signed a framework agreement with Rheinmetall to build a munitions ignition powder factory for 535 million euros ($626.3 million), the country’s industry ministry said.
• Germany approved a record 12.8 billion euros ($14.9bn) of weapons exports last year, largely driven by Berlin’s support for Ukraine, according to a report approved by the cabinet. A total of 8.15 billion ($9.49bn) euros worth of defence products were approved for Ukraine, or 64 percent of the total, according to the report.
• German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk visited Moldova in a show of support for the country’s pro-European government and slammed what they described as Russian “lies” and “hybrid attacks”.
• All NATO members will hit a longstanding target of spending 2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on defence this year, but only three currently reach a new, higher 3.5 percent goal set by alliance leaders in June, NATO data released on Thursday showed.
• Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan formally inaugurated Turkiye’s integrated air defence system known as the “Steel Dome”, which he described as a watershed moment for the country and its defence industry.

Economy

• Russia sees economic growth in 2025 slowing to 1.5 percent, far below the earlier 2.5 percent forecast, as high interest rates imposed to reduce inflation have stifled borrowing, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov told President Vladimir Putin. Russia’s war economy grew robustly at 4.1 percent in 2023 and 4.3 percent in 2024, far faster than G7 countries, despite multiple rounds of Western sanctions imposed after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but it is slowing sharply this year.
• Russian authorities said that a ban on petrol exports would be extended to October 31 in a bid to lower fuel prices that have soared after Ukrainian attacks on refineries.
• Petrol stations have run dry in some regions of Russia after Ukrainian drones struck refineries and other oil infrastructure in recent weeks, with motorists waiting in long lines and officials resorting to rationing or cutting off sales altogether, the AP news agency reports. Russian media outlets report fuel shortages are hitting consumers in several regions in the Far East and on the Crimean Peninsula, which was illegally annexed from Ukraine by Moscow in 2014.
• Crude oil shipments via the Druzhba pipeline from Russia to Hungary could resume on Thursday in test mode at lower volumes, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said in a post on X on Wednesday. Hungary and Slovakia said on Friday that oil supplies via the Druzhba pipeline could be suspended for at least five days after Ukraine’s latest attack on Russian energy infrastructure.
• US tariffs of 50 percent took effect on Wednesday on many Indian products, doubling an existing duty as US President Donald Trump sought to punish New Delhi for buying Russian oil amid the war on Ukraine.
• Ukraine has launched a tender for the right to mine a lithium deposit site in its central Kirovohrad region, the country’s Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said. The tender for the “Dobra” site is expected to be the first project in a joint investment fund with the US that was signed in April as part of Kyiv’s efforts to keep Washington’s support in its war against Russia.