Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,453

These are the key developments from day 1,453 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Ukrainian Emergency Services firefighters struggle to extinguish a fire after a Russian drone strike in Odesa [Handout via AFP]

By News Agencies

Here is where things stand on Monday, February 16:

Fighting

Russian forces launched attacks across Ukraine on Sunday, wounding six people in the central-eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, three in the northeastern Sumy region, and two in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia, the Ukrinform news outlet reported, citing local officials.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia has launched about 1,300 drones, 1,200 guided aerial bombs and dozens of ballistic missiles at Ukraine over the past week alone.
About 1,600 buildings in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, remained without heat on Sunday following recent Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, officials said.
Deputy Prime Minister Oleksii Kuleba said Russian strikes overnight on Sunday had damaged railroad infrastructure in the southern region of Odesa and the Dnipropetrovsk region.
The Ukrainian military said in a statement that it hit a key oil terminal in southern Russia, near the Moscow-annexed Crimean Peninsula, on Sunday. The attack was on the Tamanneftegaz oil terminal near the village of Volna in the Krasnodar region.
Ukrainian forces also launched a drone attack on the Russian Black Sea port of Taman, which handles oil products, grain, coal and commodities, causing damage and triggering several fires, according to Veniamin Kondratyev, the governor of Russia’s Krasnodar region. He said more than 100 people were working to put out the fires.
Kondratyev said there were more Ukrainian attacks on the Russian resort city of Sochi and the village of Yurovka, close to the seaside town of Anapa. They caused less significant damage, he added.

Russian air defences downed five drones approaching the Russian capital, Moscow, according to Mayor Sergei Sobyanin.

A Ukrainian attack also left five municipalities in the Russian border region of Bryansk and parts of its capital without heat and electricity, Governor Alexander Bogomaz said.

Russia’s Ministry of Defence said on Sunday that its troops had taken the village of Tsvitkove in the southeastern Zaporizhia region, according to the TASS news agency. Russia controls about 75 percent of the Zaporizhia region, but battle lines had been largely static since 2022 until recent Russian advances.

Russia’s army chief, Valery Gerasimov, said on Sunday that Russian troops had seized a dozen villages in eastern Ukraine in February. He made the announcement while visiting Russian troops in Ukraine, the AFP news agency reported.

Politics and diplomacy

Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau arrested the country’s former energy minister, German Galushchenko, who resigned in November amid a huge corruption scandal, as he tried to cross Ukraine’s border.

Zelenskyy said in a statement that Ukraine has agreed to new energy and military support packages with European allies.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said she felt that the bloc’s governments were not ready to give Ukraine a date for membership into the EU, despite demands from Zelenskyy.

Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics echoed Kallas’s comments, saying that “there is no readiness to accept a date” for Ukrainian membership. He added that he has little hope of an imminent peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has accused Ukraine of delaying the restart of a pipeline carrying Russian oil to Eastern Europe via Ukraine to “blackmail” Hungary to drop its opposition to Ukraine’s future EU membership.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un presided over the completion ceremony of a new housing district in Pyongyang for families of troops who died in overseas military operations, state media KCNA reported. It is believed that more than 6,000 North Korean soldiers were killed while fighting alongside Russian troops in Ukraine.

Russia will not end the militarisation of its economy after fighting in Ukraine ends, the head of Latvia’s intelligence agency, Egils Zviedris, told the AFP news agency on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, which ended on Sunday.

A wounded Ukrainian serviceman walks in a street in Kyiv during snow fall on Sunday, February 15 [Sergei Supinsky/AFP]