Here is how things stand on Wednesday, August 13:
Fighting
- A Russian attack killed a civilian and injured one other person in Shakhove, in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, Governor Vadym Filashkin said in a post on Telegram.
- Russian forces bombed the town of Bilozerske, also in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, overnight, killing two people and injuring seven, including a 16-year-old boy, the regional prosecutor’s office said.
- The AFP news agency reported that Ukrainians were evacuating Bilozerske as Russian troops made gains in the area, while Ukrainian battlefield monitoring group DeepState reported that Russian forces had advanced in Nikanorivka, Shcherbynivka and near Petrivka in the Donetsk region.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Russia wants Ukraine to withdraw from the entire Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine as part of a ceasefire deal, as Russian leader Vladimir Putin is due to meet United States President Donald Trump for talks about the war in Alaska on Friday.
- The Ukrainian General Staff said its forces were involved in “difficult” fighting close to Pokrovsk and Dobropillia in Donetsk, and that reinforcements were required to block attacks by small groups of Russian troops.
- Ukraine’s SBU intelligence service claimed that Ukrainian drones hit a Russian long-range drone storage warehouse in the Kzyl-Yul settlement in the Russian republic of Tatarstan.
- A person died after being injured in a Ukrainian drone attack on Monday in Arzamas, in Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod region, according to Russia’s state-run TASS news agency, which cited the regional governor.
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International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Rafael Mariano Grossi said that IAEA staff had observed smoke rising from an administration building at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, but that there was “no radiation increase, no nuclear safety impact reported, and no casualties”.
- Russian forces shot down six guided bombs and 179 drones in 24 hours, the Russian Ministry of Defence reported on Tuesday, according to TASS.
Ceasefire
- Zelenskyy said that the summit between Trump and Putin in Alaska on Friday is a “personal victory” for Putin, “because he is meeting on US territory”, and because he “has somehow postponed sanctions”.
- Zelenskyy also said he had received a “first signal” from US envoy Steve Witkoff that Russia might agree to a ceasefire, without providing further details.
- White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said that the meeting in Alaska’s capital, Anchorage, would be “a listening exercise for the president”, and that the aim was for him “to walk away with a better understanding of how we can end this war”.
- US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov spoke on the phone on Tuesday. The US State Department said that “both sides confirmed their commitment to ensure a successful event” in Alaska.
Politics and diplomacy
- Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that Putin spoke with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un about his upcoming meeting with Trump. Putin also expressed appreciation for North Korea’s support in the “liberation of the Kursk Region from the invading forces of the Kyiv regime”, the ministry said in a post on Telegram.
- Zelenskyy held calls with the president of Turkiye, the emir of Qatar, the president of Romania and the prime minister of the Netherlands on Tuesday.
The post Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,266 appeared first on Al Jazeera.
