Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 753
As the war enters its 753rd day, these are the main developments.
Published On 18 Mar 2024
Here is the situation on Sunday, March 17, 2024.
Fighting
- One person was killed and another injured in the Velykopysarivska community of Ukraine’s Sumy region, which borders Russia, according to the region’s military administration.
- The attack was one of 60 reported shelling incidents of border territories and settlements, which damaged buildings including a hospital, kindergarten, library and a gas pipeline, Sumy officials said.
- Earlier on Sunday, one man was killed and at least eight people were wounded in a Russian missile attack on the Black Sea port city of Mykolaiv, Ukrainian officials said, after an overnight strike on the port city of Odesa.
- Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said his armed forces in Ukraine were “just tearing them – the enemy – apart right now”, after Russia claimed to have captured a string of towns and villages in the east of Ukraine.
- Ukrainian shelling in the southern Russian city of Belgorod killed two people and injured eleven others, regional Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said on the Telegram messaging app.
- Five people were also wounded when a Ukrainian drone hit a car in the village of Glotovo, some 2km (1.25 miles) from the Ukrainian border, Gladkov said.
- The attack on Belgorod was one of many over several days of Ukrainian strikes that Moscow described as election sabotage.
- A Ukrainian drone attack caused a fire at a Russian oil refinery on Saturday, which burned for hours before it was brought under control.
Politics and diplomacy
- President Putin has claimed victory after early election results in Russia showed he was heading for another six-year term with some 87 percent of the vote.
- Responding to the results, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called Putin a “dictator”, “sick from power” and “doing everything he can to rule forever”.
- Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who died in a Russian prison colony last month, said, “Obviously I wrote Navalny’s name” on the ballot, after she voted in the Russian Embassy in Berlin.
- Rights group Amnesty International has decried Russia’s attempts “to alter the ethnic makeup” of Crimea by suppressing Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar identities. “These policies appear to be a blueprint for Russia’s designs on other areas of Ukraine it occupies,” Amnesty said. Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.
Source: Al Jazeera and news agencies