These are the most important developments on the 907th day of the war.

Here is the situation on Tuesday, August 20, 2024.

Battle

• Russia said Ukraine had attacked the third and final bridge over the Sejm River in the Kursk region, where Kyiv made a surprise incursion across the border on August 6.
• In his first comments on the offensive’s objectives, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the offensive’s goal was to create a “buffer zone” and limit Russia’s ability to launch wide-ranging attacks on Ukraine. Ukrainian forces controlled more than 1,250 square kilometers of land and 92 settlements in the Kursk region, he later added.
• Ukraine urged families with children to immediately leave the town of Pokrovsk in the eastern Donetsk region as Russian troops advanced. About 53,000 people are believed to still be living there.
• Indicating the intensity of fighting on the Pokrovsk front, the Ukrainian military said its forces were involved in 63 battles around Pokrovsk and 21 in the Toretsk area on Monday. Some of the fighting continued into the night, the military said.
• Meanwhile, the Russian Defense Ministry said its forces had captured the town of Zalizne near Toretsk. Before the start of Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Zalizne was home to about 5,000 people.
• At least four people were killed in Russian attacks on Toretsk and Tsaritsyna, another front-line settlement, Ukraine said.
• Denis Pushilin, the Moscow-appointed governor of Russian-occupied Donetsk, said at least one woman was killed and 10 people injured when a bus stop in the city of Donetsk came under Ukrainian artillery fire.
• Vasily Golubev, governor of the southern Russian region of Rostov, said more than 40 Russian firefighters were injured fighting a fire that had been burning for several days at an oil facility and was hit by a Ukrainian drone. Golubev said 18 of the firefighters were being treated in hospital and five were in intensive care.
• The European branch of the World Health Organization said it had recorded a total of 1,940 attacks on health facilities in Ukraine since the start of the large-scale Russian invasion.

Politics and Diplomacy

• Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit Ukraine on Friday and meet Zelensky, the first visit by an Indian leader in over 30 years. Modi visited Moscow last month and met Russian President Vladimir Putin.
• Russia complained to Germany about the investigation into the 2022 explosions that damaged the Nord Stream gas pipelines after a key suspect evaded arrest in Poland despite a German arrest warrant. The suspect – a Ukrainian diver – had left Poland before he could be arrested.
• Russia has banned a number of “hostile” British think tanks and 32 of their employees. The list includes the well-known foreign policy think tank Chatham House and the Aga Khan Foundation.
• Russian prosecutors said they had designated the Clooney Foundation for Justice, a U.S. nonprofit, as an “undesirable” organization because it works “on a Hollywood scale” to discredit Moscow. The foundation was founded by actor George Clooney and his wife, human rights lawyer Amal Clooney.
• A day earlier, President Alexander Lukashenko announced that he would station almost a third of the country’s armed forces along the border, Lukashenko added.