Russia-Ukraine War: List of main events, day 800 | Russia-Ukraine war news

As the war enters its 800th day, these are the key developments.

This is the situation on Saturday, May 4, 2024.

Fighting

• France estimates that 150,000 Russian soldiers were killed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Foreign Minister Stephane Sejourne said in an interview.
• Russia claims to have shot down four US-made long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS), recently supplied by the United States to Ukraine, over the occupied Crimean peninsula.
• Two people died in a Russian attack on the city of Kurakhove, located in the eastern Donetsk region of Ukraine. Two other people were also injured.

• Russia launched a nighttime drone attack in the Ukrainian regions of Kharkiv and Dnipro, injuring at least six people, including three women and a child, and hitting critical infrastructure, commercial and residential buildings.

• The Ukrainian Air Force says Russian forces launched 13 Iranian-made Shahed drones targeting the northeast and central regions of the country, but its air defense units shot them all down.

• At least one person was seriously injured and private homes and infrastructure facilities were damaged in Ukraine’s central Kirovohrad region as a result of a Russian missile attack, according to a local official.

• Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) says it has killed a man allegedly recruited by Ukraine to blow up military buildings and energy facilities in the country, state media reported. The alleged plans included attacking “Ministry of Defense facilities in the Moscow region and against members of a volunteer battalion and a volunteer center in St. Petersburg.”

Policy

• The Kremlin called British Foreign Secretary David Cameron’s statement that Ukraine could use British weapons against targets inside Russia if it wanted to as a direct and dangerous escalation of tensions surrounding the conflict.

• Cameron has pledged £3 billion ($3.7 billion) of annual military aid to Ukraine “for as long as necessary”.

• Russia criticized new comments by French President Emmanuel Macron, in which he repeated that the possibility of sending ground troops to Ukraine should not be ruled out. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters the statement “is very important and very dangerous.”
• Russia accused the US of using the threat of secondary sanctions against Chinese companies involved with it as a “pretext” to try to contain China. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova says China’s economy “irritates the US to an extreme degree” so it is using sanctions “to stand firm”. [its] economic leadership”.
• A Russian military court has extended the detention of a theater director and a playwright for six months, in a case that has shaken the already diminished theater community. Director Yevgeniya Berkovich and writer Svetlana Petriychuk were arrested a year ago, accused of “justifying terrorism” in an award-winning play performed several years ago.

Economy

• Ukraine’s central bank introduced its biggest wartime monetary liberalization measures aimed at easing restrictions on businesses, more than two years after Russia’s invasion led to the imposition of tough restrictions.

• Most of the new provisions, which will come into force on May 14, include the lifting of foreign exchange restrictions on imports of goods and services, as well as the easing of restrictions on the transfer of foreign currency from representative offices to parent companies.

• Central bank governor Andriy Pyshnyi, writing on Facebook, described the measures as a “very tangible step” that would provide companies with “opportunities to enter new markets or bring in investment.”
• Ukraine’s economy, supported by financial aid from its Western partners, grew 5.3% last year and is forecast to grow 3% this year, a reversal from 2022 when the economy shrank by about a third in the first year of the war.