These are the key developments as the war enters its 896th day.

Here is the situation on Friday, August 9, 2024.

Battle

• Heavy fighting continued in Russia’s southwestern Kursk region after about 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers, supported by tanks and armored vehicles, launched a cross-border attack on the morning of August 6.
• According to official figures, around 3,000 people have been evacuated from the area, where a local state of emergency is in effect.
• The Russian Defense Ministry said its troops were “continuing to destroy Ukrainian armed units” and pushing them back with airstrikes, missiles and artillery fire. It said it had called up reserves and was “thwarting attempts to break through” deeper into the Kursk region.
• Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podoliak said Russia’s “clear aggression” was the reason for “every escalation, every artillery shelling, every military action, every forced evacuation and destruction of normal forms of life, including on (Russia’s) own territories such as the Kursk and Belgorod regions.”
• “Russia has brought war to our country and should feel what it has done,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his evening address to the nation, without directly addressing the offensive. He also praised the Ukrainian army for its ability to “surprise” and achieve results, but again did not explicitly refer to the situation in Kursk.
• A young man and his six-year-old brother were killed when a Russian guided bomb hit a schoolyard in the village of Mohrytsia in Ukraine’s Sumy region, just across the border from Kursk, Volodymyr Artyukh, head of the Sumy region’s military administration, said on national television. “Such a high number of bombs per day has never been seen in the Sumy region,” he said of the 56 guided bombs dropped in the past 24 hours.
• At least four people were killed and 11 injured in Russian attacks on the eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk, according to the region’s governor, Vadym Filashkin. Two people were killed when a residential area in Kostiantynivka, west of Bakhmut, came under fire. Two more people were killed and 11 injured in an attack on Selydove, a town in the southwest. Several apartment blocks and administrative buildings were also damaged in the attack.

• A 12-year-old boy was injured and two houses damaged in Russian attacks on the central Dnipropetrovsk region, said Governor Serhiy Lysak.
• One man was killed and another injured in the Ukrainian shelling of Shebekino in the Russian region of Belgorod, regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov wrote on his Telegram channel.

Politics and Diplomacy

• Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff, said that while Moscow may attend the next peace summit led by Kyiv, this should not be seen as the start of negotiations with Russia.
• The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry described Niger’s decision to follow Mali’s example and break off relations with Kyiv as “regrettable”.
• A court in southern Russia sentenced Ukrainian Tetiana Klyuchko to 12 years in a penal colony after finding her guilty of joining a “terrorist” group and attempting to commit a “terrorist act” in a Russian-occupied part of Ukraine’s Zaporizhia region.
• A Moscow-controlled court in the eastern Ukrainian region of Luhansk, which is almost entirely occupied by Russia, sentenced Ukrainian Yuri Galetsky to 13 years in prison after he was found guilty of espionage for passing on information about troop movements.

Weapons

• Ukraine introduced a new robot dog called “BAD One,” which it could soon use for more dangerous front-line missions.