As the war enters its 915th day, these are the main developments.

Here is the situation on Wednesday, August 28, 2024.

Fighting

• At least six people were killed across Ukraine, including in the central city of Kryvyi Rih and in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, in a second day of Russian missile and drone attacks. At least nine people were injured. On Monday, Russia launched its biggest aerial assault since the start of its invasion in 2022.
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine would retaliate against Russia for its attacks. The air force said Ukraine brought down five out of 10 missiles and 60 out of 81 drones Russia fired on Tuesday, with some of them destroyed by Western-supplied F-16 fighter jets. It said it lost track of 10 more drones and they probably came down somewhere on Ukrainian territory. One more crossed into neighbouring Belarus.
• Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskii, said Ukraine had captured 594 Russian soldiers and taken control of 1,294 sq km (almost 500 sq miles) and 100 settlements since launching its incursion into Russia’s western Kursk region on August 6.
• Rafael Grossi, director general at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), visited the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant. He said it was vulnerable to a serious accident because it lacked a protective dome that could shield it from missiles, drones and artillery amid the fighting in the region.
• Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor of Russia’s western Belgorod region, said the situation on the border with Ukraine was “difficult but under control” after reports on Russian Telegram channels that Ukraine attacked a border checkpoint at Nekhoteyevka before being pushed back.
• Speaking on television, Ukraine’s Syrskii said the situation around Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine was “fairly difficult” with Russia trying to disrupt Ukraine’s supply lines to the front. “The enemy is using its advantage in personnel, weapons and military equipment, it is actively using artillery and aviation,” he said. Earlier, Russia’s Ministry of Defence said its forces had captured the village of Orlivka, which is near Pokrovsk.

Politics and diplomacy

• Zelenskyy said he would present a “victory plan” to United States President Joe Biden and his two potential successors, probably while he is in New York for the United Nations General Assembly next month. The plan was designed to ensure Ukraine was in a strong position going into eventual talks to end the war.  “The main point of this plan is to force Russia to end the war. And I want that very much – [that it would be] fair for Ukraine,” he told reporters in Kyiv.
• China’s Special Envoy for Eurasian Affairs Li Hui called on more countries to endorse its peace plan for Ukraine, after a round of diplomacy with Indonesia, Brazil and South Africa. “They have maintained communication with both Russia and Ukraine and stay committed to a political settlement to the crisis through dialogue and negotiation,” Li said. China did not attend the peace summit organised by Switzerland in June. It issued a joint peace plan with Brazil earlier this year.
• Moscow said Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin had “exchanged perspectives” on the war in Ukraine. Modi was in Kyiv last week.
• Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov condemned Ukraine’s move to ban a Russia-linked branch of the Orthodox Church, describing it as an attack on Christianity and a blow to freedom of religion. Kyiv has accused the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) of abetting Moscow’s 30-month-old war by spreading pro-Russian propaganda and harbouring spies.

• Russia’s FSB security service said it had opened criminal cases against two more foreign journalists who crossed the Russian border to report from the Kursk region after Ukraine’s incursion. The Interfax news agency said the journalists included a reporter for German broadcaster Deutsche Welle and a correspondent for Ukraine’s 1+1 TV channel. The FSB has now brought criminal cases against at least seven foreign journalists who have reported from Kursk.

Weapons

• Zelenskyy said the military had recently carried out the first successful test of a domestically-produced ballistic missile. He said he was not able to share more details.

Ukraine continues to reel from Russia’s missile strike on Monday, which ranks as the largest attack since the start of the war, as Moscow is beginning to suggest that Ukraine could make desperate moves. 

“Russia’s large-scale strikes on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure on Monday are almost certainly in response to Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk Oblast, breaching Russia’s border,” Rebekah Koffler, told Fox News Digital. 

“Zelenskyy likely anticipated Russia’s retaliation and accepted the risk anyway,” Koffler explained. “Zelenskyy wants to stay in the fight – there’s no other path for him personally or professionally.”

“To stay in the fight, he needs more weapons and financing from the West,” she added. “Zelenskyy likely seeks from the Biden Administration the removal of restrictions for the employment of U.S.-provided weapons, so Ukrainian forces can strike targets deeper inside Russia that are currently within range.” 

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On Monday, Russia launched 100 missiles and 100 drones as Ukraine continued its incursion into the Kursk region, which marked the first land invasion of Russia since World War II and the most significant setback for Russian President Vladimir Putin since his troops invaded Ukraine. The strikes knocked out key energy infrastructure in 15 regions across the country, killed five people and injured many others, French outlet Le Monde reported. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed on his Telegram channel that Western allies had effectively hamstrung Ukraine with restrictions on weapon use, arguing that “We could do much more to protect lives if the air forces of our European neighbors worked together with our F-16 [fighters] and anti-aircraft defenses.”

Russia followed up that massive strike with a second volley overnight Monday, which killed at least two people as missiles and drones rained down across the Zaporizhzhia region in the southeast, the BBC reported. Ukraine used newly-deployed F16s to help shoot down five missiles and 60 drones, limiting the second strike’s impact to a couple dozen projectiles overall.  

President Biden blasted Russia for the “outrageous” attacks and promised to support Ukraine’s energy grid. British Foreign Secretary David Lammy ridiculed Russia for “cowardly missile and drone attacks on civilian infrastructure.” 

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Ukraine has started compiling a list of long-range targets to hit should Western allies agree to Zelenskyy’s request and lift restrictions on defensive strike capabilities. 

This photograph shows damaged houses on a site following an air attack in the Odesa region of Ukraine on Aug. 26, 2024, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Oleksandr Gimanov/AFP via Getty Images)

The Kursk invasion, which continues to take Moscow by surprise, aimed to divert attention away from other areas – specifically the Pokrovsk and Kurakhove sectors, according to Reuters. 

Ukrainian General Oleksandr Syrskyi in remarks broadcast on television argued that Russia had tried to disrupt Ukraine’s supply lines going into those two areas, but that following the Kursk invasion, Moscow had to redeploy around 30,000 servicemen to the Kursk front “and this figure is growing.” 

Ukrainian forces fight during military operations in Kursk region in Malaya Loknya, Kursk Region, Russia in this screen grab obtained from a handout video released on Aug. 20, 2024. (95th Air Assault Brigade/Handout via REUTERS)

Syrskyi also reported that Ukraine had captured 594 Russian servicemen during the Kursk operation along with 100 settlements, and he claimed that Ukraine had rebuffed Russia’s efforts to counterattack their push.

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Koffler advised, however, that as significant as Ukraine’s effort has proven, it remains a double-edged sword that could end up hurting Kyiv in the long-run, with Russia looking to calibrate attacks to keep them “below the threshold of U.S./NATO deploying forces into the theater.”

“While Kyiv was trying to stretch the Russian forces, it stretched its own also,” Koffler explained. “And the manpower ratio overwhelmingly favors Russia and in the war of attrition.”

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy, right, greets Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi during an official meeting on Aug. 23, 2024 in Kyiv, Ukraine. (Yan Dobronosov/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)

“Putin, on the other hand, seeks to deter Ukraine from future strikes on Russia and to compel the West to stop assisting Kyiv,” she suggested. “His objective is not a decisive military victory but the degradation of Ukraine’s defensive and industrial capacity, to make it useless for NATO and the West.”

“Putin would rather end this war sooner rather than later, but only on his terms,” she said. “The key question now is whether the Biden-Harris Administration will change policy, allowing Ukraine to be more aggressive in eroding Russia’s red lines.”

Peace efforts continue to prove distant, but various world leaders have tried their hand at seeking a deal between Russia and Ukraine to bring the conflict to a close: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, in his first week as the rotating chair of the European Union, immediately visited both Zelenskyy and Putin to seek a path forward for peace.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the past week took a run at finding a peace deal, visiting Zelenskyy over the weekend before speaking with President Biden on Monday and with Putin on Tuesday.

Modi, who reached Kyiv via train from Poland, stressed to Zelenskyy that “both sides will have to sit together and to look for ways to come out of this crisis,” the BBC reported. Zelenskyy had expressed displeasure two months ago when Modi was photographed embracing Putin during a face-to-face meeting. 

Modi circled back to Putin after both Ukraine and U.S. talks, speaking with his Russian counterpart over the phone on Tuesday. A readout of the call did not mention what the two leaders discussed. 

Fox News Digital’s Caitlin McFall and Reuters contributed to this report.