Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,377

On Tuesday, December 2, 2018, this is the situation:

Fighting

• Four people were killed and 40 others were hurt when Russian forces launched a ballistic missile at Ukrainian Dnipro, according to Ukrainian authorities.
• Pokrovsk, a strategic eastern Ukrainian town known for its logistics, has been under attack by Moscow’s forces for months, and now Russia has claimed its territory. Additionally, it seized control of Kharkiv’s northeastern town Vovchansk.
• Apparently, a video of Russian soldiers raising their country’s flag over Pokrovsk’s central square, also known as Krasnoarmeysk, was posted by the Russian Ministry of Defense.
• Russian military commanders informed President Vladimir Putin about Pokrovsk’s capture on Sunday while he was visiting an unidentified military command post, according to the Russian state TASS news agency. Puntin referred to the action as “important” and claimed that it would “assure solutions to the issues we initially identified at the start of the special military operation.”
• According to TASS, the leader of the Russian General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, the Russian forces were determined to advance with the annexation of the entire Donbass region, an industrialized region that included the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine.
• However, Ukrainian officials have not provided proof that Pokrovsk or Vovchansk were controlled by Russia.
• The settlement of Klynove in the Donetsk region of Ukraine was taken on Monday, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.
• Russian forces seized about 505 sq km (195 sq miles) of Ukrainian territory in November, according to Ukraine’s DeepState military blog, nearly twice the amount taken in October. According to the open source mapping organization, Russian forces in the southeast of Zaporizhia region’s Zaporizhia region were the ones who had the best success.
• Following a significant Ukrainian drone attack on November 29, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), which mainly exports oil from Kazakhstan to an export terminal in Russia, announced on Monday that it had resumed oil shipments from one mooring point at its Black Sea terminal.

diplomacy and politics

• In Paris, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, met with Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, to bolster the support for Kyiv in the face of territorial disputes.
• Zelenskyy stated that he anticipated speaking with US President Donald Trump about “key issues that are quite challenging”.
• Macron claimed that only Ukraine and Russia could choose where its territories would be in peace negotiations and that the situation “could be decisive” for Ukraine’s future peace and security in Europe.
• Macron and Trump later on Monday spoke about “next steps in the mediation efforts,” with Macron stating that Ukraine’s need for security guarantees is crucial.
• Following the talks between US and Ukrainian delegations in Florida on Sunday, the White House stated on Monday that the Trump administration was “very optimistic” about reaching an agreement to end the conflict in Ukraine.
• Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy, is scheduled to meet with Putin in Moscow on Tuesday, according to the comments.
• Kaja Kallas, the head of the European Union’s foreign policy, expressed concern about the planned Putin-Witkoff meeting, claiming that the surrender of Ukraine would be the quickest way to put an end to the conflict.
• Russian banker Andrei Kostin predicted that Moscow would react if the EU seized Russian assets owned by European investors in Russia by seizing them for a loan to Ukraine. He also warned that Moscow might start a half-century of legal battles over the money.

Weapons and military assistance

• The Dutch government pledged to purchase US arms worth about 250 million euros ($290 million) worth for Kyiv after the Netherlands and Ukraine signed a joint agreement for drone production.
• According to the Dutch government, the weapons will include weapons for F-16 fighter jets and unmanned aerial systems as well as missiles and equipment for air defense.

Regional security

• Following a drone attack on a tanker that is a part of Russia’s so-called “shadow fleet,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has condemned attacks on commercial ships in Turkiye’s waters. Officials in Ukraine have confirmed the attack’s perpetrators’ identities.
• Belarus, a close ally of Russia, accused Lithuania, a member of the EU, of using a drone to eavesdrop on it and drop “extremist material” Vilnius refuted the assertion.
• Belarus, on the other hand, is to blame for the balloon incursions that caused the Vilnius airport to shut down flights. It stated that “a stop to hybrid attacks against EU countries” had been called upon by the EU’s diplomatic service to summon the Belarusian representative in Brussels.