Here is the situation on Wednesday, April 17, 2024.

Fighting

• Ukraine’s Air Force said air defence systems destroyed nine Russian drones launched over several eastern and southern regions.
• The Institute for the Study of War, a United States-based think tank, said Russian troops on the front line were “breaking out of positional warfare and beginning to restore maneuver to the battlefield” because of US delays in providing military assistance to Ukraine. The think tank warned Ukrainian troops would not be able to hold their current lines “without the rapid resumption of US assistance, particularly air defense and artillery”.
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed into law a new mobilisation bill to address severe troop shortages. The new law includes measures to toughen penalties on draft dodgers and incentivise conscription but no plan to demobilise long-serving soldiers on the front line. The changes come into effect in one month.
• Ukraine’s Human Rights Commissioner Dmytro Lubinets said almost 37,000 people, including military personnel, were unaccounted for since Russia’s full-scale invasion of his country began in February 2022, warning the actual figure may be “much higher”. Ukraine and the Red Cross had also identified about 1,700 people “illegally detained” by Russia, Lubinets said.

Politics and diplomacy

• On a visit to Beijing, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz asked Chinese President Xi Jinping “to exert pressure on Russia so that [President Vladimir] Putin finally calls off his insane campaign, withdraws his troops and ends this terrible war”. Xi did not appear supportive of a Ukrainian-led peace summit to be held in June, however, saying any peace conference needed to be recognised by both sides and have equal participation.
• A Ukrainian man who says he was detained at work and tortured by Russian occupying forces filed a war crimes case in Argentina, the Reuters news agency reported. In the filing, the man accuses one named person, two identified by their call signs or military insignia, and others who are unnamed, of using electrocution and unlawful imprisonment as forms of torture in mid-to-late 2022. Russia denies committing war crimes in Ukraine.
• Russia’s FSB security service said it detained a man it accused of trying to kill a former officer in Ukraine’s main security service (SBU) who lives in exile in Moscow. The FSB alleged Kyiv had ordered the man to kill Vasily Prozorov, a former Lieutenant Colonel in the SBU, who told Russian news agencies he had passed sensitive information to Russia’s intelligence services since 2014. Prozorov’s car exploded in a suspected car bombing in Moscow last week.

Weapons

• Zelenskyy said Ukraine “ran out” of defensive weapons to defend the Trypilska thermal power plant (TTPP), one of the biggest electricity suppliers to the Kyiv region, which allowed it to be destroyed by Russian missiles on April 11.
• Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said 20 countries had pledged enough to buy 500,000 artillery shells for Ukraine under a Czech-led international fundraising drive to buy ammunition for the Ukrainian army.