As the war enters its 906th day, these are the main developments.

Here is the situation on Monday, August 19, 2024.

Fighting

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for the first time stated the aim of Ukraine’s August 6 incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, saying the operation was necessary to create a buffer zone.
• Ukrainian Air Force commander Mykola Oleshchuk said the air force destroyed a second strategically important bridge over the Seym River in the Kursk region. He posted an aerial video of a blast tearing through the bridge, which appeared to be near the village of Zvannoye, about 15km (nine miles) north of the Ukrainian border.
• Vasily Golubev, the governor of Russia’s southern Rostov region, said falling debris from a Ukrainian drone attack triggered a large fire at an oil storage facility in the town of Proletarsk. There were no reports of injuries. Ukraine acknowledged the attack.
• Russia’s Ministry of Defence said its forces took control of the village of Svyrydonivka, about 15km (nine miles) from the key town of Pokrovsk in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.
• The military administration in Kyiv said Russia carried out its third ballistic missile attack on the Ukrainian capital this month but initial data suggested the weapons were shot down on approach. Separately, the air force’s Oleshchuk said eight Russian attack drones and five out of eight missiles launched across the country, including Kyiv, were destroyed.
• Zelenskyy said Russia had launched more than 40 missiles, 750 guided aerial bombs and 200 attack drones in the past week against Ukrainian villages and cities.
• International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Rafael Grossi said that safety at Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant was deteriorating following a drone strike that hit a perimeter access road on Saturday.
• Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko claimed Kyiv had stationed more than 120,000 soldiers along its border with Belarus and told the state news agency that he had deployed a third of all Belarusian soldiers to the border. Andriy Demchenko, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian border service, told Ukrainian media outlet Ukrainska Pravda that the situation on the Belarus border had not changed.

Politics and diplomacy

• North Korea condemned Ukraine’s August 6 incursion into Russia’s Kursk region as an “act of terror” and said it would always stand with Russia, according to state media.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Azerbaijan’s capital Baku for a two-day state visit, according to Russian news agencies. Putin will hold talks with Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev on bilateral relations and “international and regional problems”, the Kremlin said.