These are the key developments as the war enters its 895th day.

Here is the situation on Thursday, August 8, 2024.

Battle

• Russia declared a state of emergency and evacuated thousands of residents from border areas in the southern Kursk region after reporting that hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers, backed by tanks and armored vehicles, had crossed the border near the town of Sudzha. Russian President Vladimir Putin condemned the “large-scale provocation.” Ukraine has not confirmed the attack.
• The Russian Health Ministry said that 31 civilians, including six children, were injured in the fighting. The acting governor of the Kursk region, Alexei Smirnov, said on Tuesday that five people had been killed in the fighting. There were no details of military casualties.
• Russian war correspondent Yevgeny Poddubny is in the intensive care unit of a local hospital after being injured in a Ukrainian drone attack while reporting from the Kursk region.
• At least four people were killed and one wounded in Russian artillery shelling in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region. The region’s governor, Vadym Filashkin, said an elderly man and woman were killed in the village of Antonivka, about five kilometers from the combat zone. A man and a woman were killed in a separate attack on the settlement of Mykhaylivka.
• In the third consecutive Russian attack on the Kyiv region overnight, at least one person was injured and nearly two dozen houses were damaged, regional authorities said.
• The Ukrainian Air Force said it had shot down all 30 drones launched by Russia over seven regions of Ukraine.
• Ukrainian military intelligence confirmed that its forces carried out an attack on the Russian-controlled Tendra Spit in the northwestern Black Sea, damaging equipment and fortifications and causing casualties. Moscow-based authorities in the region said on Tuesday that Russian forces had repelled a Ukrainian attempt to land on the Russian-controlled spit.

Politics and Diplomacy

• Estonian prosecutors have charged 57-year-old Russian-Estonian journalist Svetlana Burceva with treason and violating international sanctions against Moscow, AFP news agency reported, citing a statement by prosecutor Eneli Laurits. Burceva has been collaborating with Estonian online sites controlled by the Russian state-run media group Rossiya Segodnya since 2017.
• A Moscow court sentenced Russian military blogger Andrei Kurshin to six and a half years in prison after the former soldier was found guilty of “deliberately spreading false information about the Russian armed forces.” On his Telegram channel, Kurshin had accused the Russian armed forces of cutting off water supplies to Ukrainian civilians and bombing a maternity hospital.
• Russian-American citizen Ksenia Karelina has pleaded guilty to treason in a Russian court, state news agency RIA Novosti quoted her lawyer as saying on Wednesday. Karelina is on trial in the city of Yekaterinburg over a donation she made in 2022 to a charity supporting Ukraine.