Here is the situation on Saturday, March 16, 2024.

Fighting

• Ukraine’s President Volodymr Zelenskyy has condemned a Russian missile attack on the Black Sea port city of Odesa in which at least 21 people were killed and 75 wounded.
• Zelenskyy said Russia would receive a “fair response” from Ukrainian forces for what he called a “vile” strike on a city that has been attacked by Russian drones or missiles almost every day this month.
• Ukrainian authorities have begun mass evacuations of communities in the northern Sumy region, close to the Russian border, after extended periods of intense shelling of the area, local officials said.
• Ukrainian drones struck two oil refineries belonging to Russian state-owned oil giant Rosneft in Samara region, Governor Dmitry Azarov said on Telegram.
• There were no casualties but the Volga river region’s Syzran refinery was on fire, he said, while an attack on the Novokuibyshevsk refinery was thwarted.
• Russia’s President Vladimir Putin promised to punish Ukraine for what he said was election day shelling that struck civilian targets on Russian territory. Russians are voting in elections that end on Sunday, with Putin widely expected to win a fifth term.

Politics and diplomacy

• Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations, said elections in the Russian-occupied regions of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, Zaporizhia and Crimea, which Russia invaded and annexed in 2014, were “illegitimate”.
• “Holding elections in another UN member state’s territory without its consent is in manifest disregard for the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity. Such elections have no validity under international law,” Kyslytsya said in a joint statement with European Union countries, the United States, the United Kingdom and other nations.
• A UN commission of inquiry on Ukraine said it had gathered more evidence that Russia has systematically tortured Ukrainian prisoners of war, through rape threats and the use of electric shocks on genitals. Some Ukrainian prisoners were so hungry in Russian detention centres that they resorted to eating soap, worms and leftover dog food, the report said.
• The Group of Seven (G7) countries warned Iran against providing ballistic missiles to Russia to use in its war against Ukraine and said it would “respond swiftly” with new sanctions, including possibly banning Iran Air from Europe.
• German Chancellor Olaf Scholz hosted French President Emmanuel Macron and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk in Berlin for urgent discussions on how best to support Ukraine, which is short on the military resources needed to definitively halt Russia’s invasion.