Here is how things stand on Sunday, September 21:

Fighting

• Russian forces launched a large-scale missile and drone attack, targeting areas across Ukraine, killing at least three people and wounding dozens more, according to Ukrainian officials.
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia launched 580 drones and 40 missiles, and that the attacks took place across nine regions, including Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv, Chernihiv, Zaporizhia, Poltava, Kyiv, Odesa, Sumy and Kharkiv.
• Ukrainian forces launched drone attacks on Russia’s southwestern Samara region, killing at least four people, according to Governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev announced on social media. The region is located 800km (497 miles) from the front line in Ukraine.
• The Reuters news agency, citing Ukraine’s SBU security agency, said Ukrainian drones hit Russian oil pumping stations, which are part of the Kuibyshev-Tikhoretsk oil pipeline, in the Volgograd and Samara regions. The facilities that were targeted were involved in Russian oil exports via the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, the report said.
• The Russian Ministry of Defence said its forces shot down 383 Ukrainian drones over the past day.
• The ministry also claimed control of the village of Berezove in Ukraine’s southeastern Dnipropetrovsk region.

Regional security

• Poland and its allies scrambled aircraft to ensure the safety of Polish airspace early on Saturday after Russia launched attacks on western Ukraine, the country’s armed forces announced.
• The move came after Poland shot down suspected Russian drones in its airspace earlier this month, and Estonia said three Russian military jets violated its airspace for 12 minutes on Friday.
• The United Kingdom also sent two fighter jets on their first NATO air defence sortie over Poland as part of the alliance’s Eastern Sentry mission, its government said.
• Lithuanian Minister of Defence Dovile Sakaliene has called on NATO to urgently move air defence capabilities to front-line states, saying citizens of NATO states are “being threatened almost every day now”.

Politics and diplomacy

Advertisement

• Ukraine’s Zelenskyy said that he would meet United States President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York next week to discuss security guarantees for his country and sanctions on Russia.
• Zelenskyy said he expects the US to impose a new round of strong sanctions against Russia, a day after the European Union also announced its 19th round of sanctions package on Moscow.
• Russia has intensified its use of criminal prosecution, long-term imprisonment, intimidation, torture and ill-treatment to silence opposition since its invasion of Ukraine, according to Mariana Katzarova, the UN special rapporteur on the rights situation in Russia. The report detailing a “seismic decline” of the human rights situation in Russia will be presented to the Human Rights Council on Monday.