Here is the situation on Saturday, September 28, 2024.

Fighting

At least six people have been killed following two consecutive Russian attacks on a medical centre in Sumy in northeastern Ukraine, according to, Ukraine’s Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko. The first attack killed one person and damaged parts of the facility. As people were evacuated, the Russians struck again, killing five more, he said.

Ukraine’s air force said it shot down 69 of 73 drones during an overnight Russian attack that included two ballistic and two cruise missiles. About 15 of the attack drones were destroyed on the outskirts and in the capital Kyiv, the military said.

At least three people have been killed and six others injured, after a Russian missile attack on the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih struck a five-storey building housing the regional police department, the regional governor Serhiy Lysak said.

A Russian drone attack on Ukraine’s Izmail, a strategic port town on the River Danube, has killed three people and wounded 11 others, including one child, Odesa regional governor Oleg Kiper said in a statement.

Russia claims it has captured the village of Marynivka in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region, where its forces have been pushing towards the important logistics hub of Pokrovsk.

Ukraine’s General Staff neither confirmed nor denied the capture of Marynivka, but noted that the village was among nearly a dozen localities where Russian forces had “received a fierce rebuff”. It said two Russian attacks in the area were continuing, and fighting in the Pokrovsk and Kurakhove sectors was the most difficult.

Politics and diplomacy

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has presented Ukraine’s war “victory plan” to Donald Trump during a closed-door meeting in New York. Trump praised Zelenskyy but said he also had a solid relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

China and Brazil have led a gathering in New York of 17 developing countries to back a plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, despite Zelenskyy’s dismissal of the initiative. China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi said the leaders discussed the need to prevent escalation in the war, to avoid the use of weapons of mass destruction and prevent attacks on nuclear power plants.

A report that Russia is developing a China-backed attack drone programme for the war in Ukraine is “deeply concerning”, Nabila Massrali, a European Union spokesperson said. It was reported earlier that a subsidiary of a Russian state-owned arms company has flight-tested the new drone model in China.

South Korea’s Foreign Minister Cho Tae-yul has told the UN General Assembly that Russia is engaging in illegal arms trade with North Korea, reiterating statements by the US, Ukraine and independent analysts that Pyongyang is supplying rockets and missiles in return for economic and other military assistance from Moscow.

Nine children taken from an orphanage in Kherson to Russia, have returned home with the help of Qatar acting as an intermediary, Ukraine’s ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets announced. The children ranged in age from 13 to 17, with a 20-year-old man also included in the operation.

Nikolai Patrushev, a close aide to Putin, has accused the West of trying to isolate Russia’s European exclave of Kaliningrad by restricting the supply of goods to it by road and rail. Kaliningrad, an exclave on the Baltic coast sandwiched between NATO and EU members Lithuania and Poland, is home to Russia’s Baltic Fleet.

Russia’s FSB security service said it was investigating two journalists from Australia and one from Romania for reporting in parts of Russia’s Kursk region occupied by Ukrainian forces, bringing the total of such investigations to 12. The three journalists, who could face up to five years in prison, do not appear to be in Russia.