Here is the situation on Sunday, March 17, 2024.

Fighting

• One person was killed and another injured in the Velykopysarivska community of Ukraine’s Sumy region, which borders Russia, according to the region’s military administration.
• The attack was one of 60 reported shelling incidents of border territories and settlements, which damaged buildings including a hospital, kindergarten, library and a gas pipeline, Sumy officials said.
• Earlier on Sunday, one man was killed and at least eight people were wounded in a Russian missile attack on the Black Sea port city of Mykolaiv, Ukrainian officials said, after an overnight strike on the port city of Odesa.
• Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said his armed forces in Ukraine were “just tearing them – the enemy – apart right now”, after Russia claimed to have captured a string of towns and villages in the east of Ukraine.
• Ukrainian shelling in the southern Russian city of Belgorod killed two people and injured eleven others, regional Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said on the Telegram messaging app.
• Five people were also wounded when a Ukrainian drone hit a car in the village of Glotovo, some 2km (1.25 miles) from the Ukrainian border, Gladkov said.
• The attack on Belgorod was one of many over several days of Ukrainian strikes that Moscow described as election sabotage.
• A Ukrainian drone attack caused a fire at a Russian oil refinery on Saturday, which burned for hours before it was brought under control.

Politics and diplomacy

• President Putin has claimed victory after early election results in Russia showed he was heading for another six-year term with some 87 percent of the vote.
• Responding to the results, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called Putin a “dictator”, “sick from power” and “doing everything he can to rule forever”.
• Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who died in a Russian prison colony last month, said, “Obviously I wrote Navalny’s name” on the ballot, after she voted in the Russian Embassy in  Berlin.
• Rights group Amnesty International has decried Russia’s attempts “to alter the ethnic makeup” of Crimea by suppressing Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar identities. “These policies appear to be a blueprint for Russia’s designs on other areas of Ukraine it occupies,” Amnesty said. Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.