Here is the situation on Monday, August 7, 2023.
Fighting
- Russia launched a wave of air attacks on Ukraine, using cruise and hypersonic missiles as well as Iranian-made drones, according to the Ukrainian air force. “In total, the enemy used 70 air assault weapons in several waves,” in the night from Saturday to Sunday, it said.
- “Unfortunately, there are casualties and wounded among the civilian population. Residential buildings and other civilian infrastructure suffered destruction,” it added in a statement.
- The Ukrainian air force said it shot down 30 of the 40 cruise missiles and all the Shahed drones. It did not specify which sites were hit by the missiles that got through air defences.
- The Russian army, however, said it attacked “Ukrainian armed forces airbases around the settlements of Starokostiantyniv in the Khmelnytskyi region and Dubno in the Rivne region”.
- Ukrainian officials, meanwhile, said at least two people were killed and four wounded in a Russian bomb attack on a blood transfusion centre in the city of Kupiansk in the eastern Kharkiv region.
- Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hailed the West for its military support, saying Kyiv’s forces are seeing “significant results” from air defence systems supplied by the United States and Germany. These include the US-built Patriot and Germany’s IRIS-T.
- Russian air defences were also at work on Sunday as Ukraine targeted two bridges on its occupied territory. Moscow-installed officials said Kyiv’s forces launched a missile attack near the Chonhar Bridge, damaging the overpass that connects southern Ukraine to the Russian-annexed Crimean peninsula.
- Another Ukrainian attack on one of the three road links between Crimea and Russian-occupied parts of mainland Ukraine, near the town of Henichesk in the Kherson region, wounded a civilian and damaged a gas pipeline, Moscow-installed officials said. One civilian death was reported in the Russian-controlled Donetsk region after Ukrainian forces shelled a university there.
- Russian air defences also brought down a Ukrainian drone near the city of Moscow, according to Mayor Sergei Sobyanin. The attack caused Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport to suspend operations briefly.
Diplomacy
- A Ukraine-organised two-day peace summit in Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah has ended without any concrete action beyond a commitment to further consultations.
- Andriy Yermak, the chief of staff to Zelenskyy, said the discussions had been very productive but did not give any details.
- Russia did not attend. Its deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, said the meeting reflected the West’s “doomed efforts” to mobilise developing nations behind Zelenskyy.
Politics
- In Kyiv, workers installed Ukraine’s trident of arms on the shield of a gigantic statue overlooking the capital after removing a Soviet hammer and sickle from the monument.
- The operation to put the trident on the 62-metre-tall steel figure of a female warrior began last month, as Ukraine purges its public areas of reminders of Russian and Soviet rule. The statue is also set to be renamed “Mother Ukraine”.
