Fighting

• President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukrainian troops had advanced in their three-month-old counteroffensive against Russian occupying forces in the east and south. “Over the past seven days, we have made an advance in the Tavria [southern] sector,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address. “There is movement in the Bakhmut sector. Yes, there is movement.” The Ukrainian president said the country’s forces were also holding their ground on other fronts in the east.
• Russia launched 33 drones at Kyiv with debris falling across several districts of the capital during the two-hour-long raid. Officials in Kyiv said 26 of the weapons were destroyed and there was no serious damage. Four people were injured.
• Russia’s defence ministry said its forces brought down eight Ukraine-launched drones over the Black Sea near Crimea and destroyed three United States-made military speedboats carrying Ukrainian military personnel northeast of Snake Island. Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.
• Two humanitarian aid workers – Spaniard Emma Igual and Canadian Anthony Ihnat – were killed in Ukraine when a missile hit the vehicle they were travelling in near Bakhmut. Two other foreign volunteers with the group – Road to Relief – were injured.

Diplomacy

• Russia wrapped up widely-condemned elections in four regions of Ukraine’s south and east that it partly occupies and claimed to have annexed last year, claiming victory for the United Russia party of President Vladimir Putin. The Council of Europe, Europe’s leading rights group, called the week-long vote a flagrant violation of international law, with Kyiv and its allies saying it was an illegal attempt to tighten Moscow’s grip over the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson regions that Ukraine is fighting to reclaim.

• South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said the country will provide an additional $2bn in aid to Ukraine starting in 2025 over the longer term, in addition to the $300m previously pledged for next year.
• Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said that Putin would not be arrested if he attended the Group of 20 meeting in Rio de Janeiro next year. In March, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Putin in connection with alleged war crimes. Russia has denied its forces have engaged in war crimes or forcibly taken Ukrainian children.
• North Korean leader Kim Jong Un marked the 75th anniversary of the founding of North Korea with a parade of paramilitary forces and a promise to deepen ties with China and Russia. The US has said that Kim plans to hold a summit with Putin as soon as this week and sell arms to Moscow.