Here is where things stand on Tuesday, February 2:
Fighting
- The Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, came under attack early on Tuesday morning from Russian missiles, Tymur Tkachenko, head of the city’s military administration, said on the Telegram messaging app.
- Tkachenko said several apartment buildings and an educational establishment had been damaged. Reuters news agency witnesses reported loud explosions in the city.
- A coal mining site in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region was attacked for the second time in 24 hours, according to the private energy producer DTEK. There were no immediate reports on casualties or damage to infrastructure.
Diplomacy and politics
- US President Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, will travel to Abu Dhabi for the talks with Russia and Ukraine on Wednesday and Thursday, a White House official said.
- Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, said that a proposal by European powers to deploy NATO-member troops in Ukraine as part of a proposed security guarantee and peace deal was unacceptable for Russia.
- German authorities detained at least five people suspected of operating a network that exported goods to Russian defence companies, contravening EU sanctions imposed after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, federal prosecutors announced.
Sport
- FIFA President Gianni Infantino said he supports the reinstatement of Russia in the football federation and called for an end to the country’s four-year exclusion from international tournaments, including the World Cup in Qatar and the qualifying matches for the 2026 World Cup.
- Sport federations that claim sport is separate from politics should not include armed conflicts in that definition, because “war is a crime, not politics”, Ukrainian Minister of Sports Matvii Bidnyi said in an interview with the AFP news agency in advance of the Winter Olympics.
Energy
- The EU’s decision last week to ban Russian gas imports was “100 percent legally sound”, the bloc’s energy commissioner, Dan Jorgensen, told reporters in Portugal’s capital, Lisbon, adding it would prevent Russia from weaponising energy amid its war on Ukraine.
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