Here are the key developments on the 1,091st day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Here is the situation on Wednesday, February 19:

Fighting

• Russia said its air defences downed 21 Ukrainian drones in the space of an hour overnight, most over Russia’s western Bryansk region. One drone was also downed over Russian-annexed Crimea.
• Kyiv’s forces said they knocked out a North Korean self-propelled howitzer artillery cannon on the eastern front in Ukraine. Kyiv said it was the first time since the start of the conflict with Russia that a North Korean М-1978 Koksan howitzer had been hit by a Ukrainian drone.
• Ukraine and Western military experts say up to 12,000 North Korean troops have been deployed in southern Russia’s Kursk region along with their military equipment and alongside Russian forces.
• Ukrainian forces engaged in 144 clashes with Russian troops on Tuesday, repelling multiple assaults across different front lines, according to the Ukrainian military, Turkiye’s official Anadolu news agency reports.

• Kyiv also said that Russian forces launched two missile strikes and 72 air strikes, and used 1,024 kamikaze drones, along with 4,200 artillery attacks that targeted Ukrainian positions and settlements, AA reports.
• In Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, Ukrainian forces said they prevented Russian advances towards Mala Shapkivka and Topoli, while Moscow’s troops launched 16 attacks in Ukraine’s Kupiansk region, with Kyiv’s forces claiming to have repelled 14, as battles continue, Anadolu reports.
• Russia said oil flows through the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, a major route for supplying Kazakhstan and exporting to the global market, have been reduced by 30 to 40 percent after a Ukrainian drone attack on a pumping station.
• The Caspian pipeline, which ships more than 1 percent of daily global oil supplies, stretches over 1,500km (939 miles) and carries crude oil from Kazakhstan’s Tengiz oilfield on Russia’s northeastern shores of the Caspian Sea as well as from Russian producers.
• Freedom in Russia and the end of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government depends on Ukraine winning the war, former chess world champion and Kremlin critic Garry Kasparov said. “There is no freedom of Russia, no end of the Putin regime, without Ukrainian victory,” said Kasparov, 61, who retired from chess in 2005 to focus on political activism, and has lived in exile in New York for the past decade.

US plans for Ukraine

• Russia and the United States agreed to establish teams to negotiate a path to ending Moscow’s war on Ukraine after talks that drew a strong rebuke from Ukraine over its exclusion from the meeting between Washington and Moscow officials in Saudi Arabia.
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy slammed his nation’s exclusion from the Riyadh talks, saying negotiations to end the war should be “fair” and involve European countries, including Turkiye – which has offered to host future discussions.
• US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov agreed at the Riyadh talks to “appoint respective high-level teams to begin working on a path to ending the conflict in Ukraine as soon as possible”, the US State Department said.
• Washington said the two sides had agreed to “establish a consultation mechanism” to address “irritants” to the US-Russia relationship, noting the sides would lay the groundwork for future cooperation.
• Rubio later briefed counterparts from France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the European Union with reports that the US told its European allies that it would have a seat at the negotiating table “at some point”.

• US President Donald Trump told reporters he was much more confident of a deal to end the Ukraine war after the talks, saying: “I think I have the power to end this.”
• Trump then chided Europe and Kyiv for complaining about being cut out of the discussions with Moscow. “Today, I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited’. Well, you’ve been there for three years,” Trump said, referring to the war. “You should have never started it. You could have made a deal… A half-baked negotiator could have settled this years ago without the loss of much land, very little land, without the loss of any lives,” Trump said, echoing his frequent claim that he could have prevented Russia’s full-scale invasion.
• Trump also said he would “probably” meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month, but did not elaborate.
• Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy aide, said it was “difficult” to discuss a date for a potential meeting between Trump and Putin.

• Moscow’s economic negotiator, Kirill Dmitriev, said that Western attempts to isolate Russia had “obviously failed”.
• The EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, urged the US not to walk into “traps” set by Russia as it attempts to divide the West. “By working together with the US, we can achieve a just and lasting peace – on Ukraine’s terms,” Kallas said.
• Polish President Andrzej Duda said that he had received US assurances that Washington would not reduce its troop presence in Poland and elsewhere along NATO’s eastern flank.

Military aid & defence spending

• EU lawmakers demanded that Europe “double down” on bolstering its defences and supporting Ukraine. “Europe can no longer fully rely on the United States to defend our shared values and interests, including continued support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” the European People’s Party, Socialists and Democrats, Renew and Greens said in a statement.
• French President Emmanuel Macron said he would host another meeting on Ukraine after the talks US-Russia talks in Riyadh. In an interview with French regional newspapers, Macron again appeared open to the idea of sending troops to Ukraine but emphasised this could take place only in the most limited fashion and away from conflict zones.
• Trump said he would not oppose Europeans if they want to send peacekeeping troops to Ukraine to provide security guarantees in the event of a peace deal.

• Latvia will further increase its defence spending to 4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) next year and 5 percent in the following years, Germany’s DPA news agency reports. Latvia, which is both an EU and NATO member, lies on NATO’s eastern flank and borders Russia.
• European defence stocks have surged as governments face pressure to increase military spending in the region, the Reuters news agency reports.

Diplomacy

• Zelenskyy has postponed a planned visit to Saudi Arabia to not give “legitimacy” to the meeting between US and Russian officials in Riyadh, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.
• Addressing a joint news conference in Ankara with Zelenskyy, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said his country would be an ideal host for possible upcoming meetings between Russia, Ukraine and the US to end the war.
• Ukraine’s Defence Minister Rustem Umerov held talks in Turkiye on strengthening defence cooperation with Ankara, and meeting with the country’s Defence Minister Yasar Guler and Land Forces Commander General Selcuk Bayraktaroglu, Anadolu reports.
• China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi told the United Nations Security Council that Beijing supports all efforts conducive to peace talks in Ukraine.
• Slovak police deported a 59-year-old Ukrainian saying investigations had found that the unnamed person was involved in organised crime in Ukraine and was connected to Ukraine’s intelligence services.

Sanctions

• Turkiye’s largest oil refiner Tupras has stopped buying Russian crude oil because of US sanctions announced on January 10 against Russian energy companies and tankers carrying Russian oil.
• The Reuters news agency said it was not clear if Tupras, which has become one of the biggest importers of Russian crude oil since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, would stop refined product imports from Russia. Russian oil represented 65 percent of Turkiye’s total oil imports in January-November 2024.