Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 817

Here is the situation on Tuesday, May 21, 2024.

Fighting

• Russia claimed to have taken full control of the settlement of Bilohorivka in Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region. Ukraine’s General Staff said fighting was continuing in the area and it was “holding back the onslaught of the enemy”.
• Roman Semenukha, the deputy governor of the northeastern Kharkiv region, told national television that Ukrainian troops remained in control of about 60 percent of Vovchansk and were fighting house-to-house to defend the border town from Russian attacks. Also speaking on national television, regional Governor Oleh Syniehubov said the Vovcha river, which cuts through the town, marked the front line.

• Ukraine’s Air Force said it shot down all 29 Russian drones that targeted various parts of the country on Monday. Two people in the southern Kherson and Zaporizhia regions were killed, while 16 of the drones were shot down over the southern region of Mykolaiv where the debris damaged a private home and caused a fire.

Politics and diplomacy

• A court in the Russian city of Novosibirsk has jailed 24-year-old Ilya Baburin for 25 years after finding him guilty of plotting an arson attack on a military recruitment office in Siberia in 2022. Prosecutors claimed he was working on instructions from Kyiv and accused him of treason.
• Russian playwright Svetlana Petriychuk and theatre director Yevgeniya Berkovich went on trial in Moscow accused of “justifying terrorism” in an award-winning play about Russian women lured to marry ISIL (ISIS) fighters in Syria and jailed on their return. The two were arrested in May last year. Berkovich has also written poems criticising Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

• Stanislav Netesov, a 25-year-old Russian man who dyed his hair blue, green and yellow was fined 50,000 roubles ($553) by a court for “discrediting” the Russian army. In court, Netesov denied his hair colour was meant as a statement of protest, saying that he does not support either Ukraine, whose flag is blue and yellow, or the Russian army.

• Karolina Lindholm Billing, the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR)’s representative in Geneva, told the AFP news agency that humanitarian aid to Ukraine was falling back even as the country’s needs were rising. The UN’s 2024 humanitarian plan for Ukraine amounts to $3.1bn this year, including $599m for the UNHCR. Lindholm Billing said the appeals were only about 15 percent funded in the first quarter of the year.
• United States Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the US was continuing to provide evidence to the International Criminal Court about war crimes committed in Ukraine.

Weapons

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the Reuters news agency in an interview that Western allies were taking too long to make key decisions on military support for Ukraine, and that he was pushing partners to get more directly involved in the war by helping to intercept Russian missiles over Ukraine and allowing Kyiv to use Western weapons against enemy military equipment amassing near the border.
• General Charles Q Brown, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and the country’s top general, said the US had no plans to send military trainers into Ukraine.