Here is the situation on Thursday, February 6:

Fighting

• Ivan Fedorov, head of the Zaporizhia Regional Military Administration, said Russian troops carried out nearly 400 attacks on nine settlements in the southeastern Zaporizhia region of Ukraine within 24 hours. Some 13 reports of damage to residential buildings, vehicles and infrastructure were recorded.
• Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Kyiv brought back 150 troops from Russian captivity, some of whom were held captive for more than two years. This effort was part of a mutual swap between both countries, brokered by the United Arab Emirates.
• Kyiv’s military said it shot down 57 of 104 drones launched by Russia overnight, while 42 did not reach their targets. The military said Moscow also shot two Iskander-M ballistic missiles at Ukraine.
• Russian state news agency TASS reported the country’s Ministry of Defence as saying Moscow’s forces captured the settlements of Baranivka and Novomlynsk in the Donetsk and Kharkiv regions of eastern Ukraine.
• Ukraine’s military said that Kyiv’s forces struck the Bashneft oil refinery in Russia’s Krasnodar region, sparking a blaze. According to the military, the oil refinery was involved in supplying gasoline and diesel to Russian forces.
• Ukrainian media reported local police saying that one person was killed, and four others were injured, in an explosion near a military conscription office in the country’s western Khmelnytskyi region.
• Kyiv’s emergency services said Russian attacks killed two people near the front line in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region and one person near the Black Sea port of Odesa.

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• Ukraine’s state news agency Interfax reported that the country’s national police chief Ivan Vyhivskyi accused Russia’s spy agencies of being responsible for explosions at Kyiv’s military draft offices.
• Ukraine’s Defence Minister Rustem Umerov said the country’s military was launching a project to develop robotic vehicle units that would “scale up the use of unmanned ground systems in the military”.

Russian gas and oil

• Igor Babushkin, governor of Russia’s Astrakhan region, told residents not to panic after its main city, which lies close to a large gas chemical complex, was enveloped in a cloud of natural gas following a Ukrainian attack. He also assured residents that natural gas is not hazardous in open spaces.

Humanitarian aid

• Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev signed a decree to allocate $1m for humanitarian aid to Ukraine, designating the funds to purchase and deliver energy equipment.

Politics and diplomacy

• Zelenskyy signed two bills on extending martial law and mobilisation for another three months, lasting until May 9.
• Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said he welcomed United States President Donald Trump’s view that drawing Ukraine towards NATO was a matter of concern for Moscow.
• Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that the country is in contact with Washington on a ministerial level between individual departments and that the contact had been “intensifying” but refused to give further details.
• Lithuania’s Energy Minister Zygimantas Vaiciunas said the three Baltic states disconnecting from the Russian power grid on Saturday to join the Western European power grid would remove “Russia’s ability to use the electricity system as a tool of geopolitical blackmail”.
• Reuters reported that the United Kingdom’s Foreign Minister David Lammy would announce 55 million pounds ($68.7m) in financial support for Kyiv to help put the country in the “strongest position possible”.
• Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) postponed the rotation of its mission to the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant due to a lack of security guarantees from Moscow. Saying this was not the first time the Kremlin “used blackmail as a tool to intimidate international experts”, the ministry warned that it would “not allow Russia to undermine the Agency’s independence”.

• Russian state news agency RIA quoted Moscow’s senior diplomat Mikhail Ulanov as accusing Ukraine of lying about the lack of Russian guarantees. Instead, Ukraine was trying to set new rules for the rotation of IAEA personnel, he reportedly said.
• Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told journalists that Zelenskyy’s comment suggesting he was ready for direct talks with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to end the war was nothing but “empty words”.
• Peskov also branded Zelenskyy’s demand for nuclear weapons as “bordering on madness,” adding that “there is a non-proliferation regime for nuclear weapons, among other things”.
• Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Ukraine has “huge” potential to buy liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the US and invited US businesses to participate in Kyiv’s reconstruction.
• Zelenskyy reaffirmed his willingness to hold elections in Ukraine but said the task remains impossible amid the war, citing legal and logistical reasons.
• The Norwegian Intelligence Service said Russia was “likely” to launch sabotage attempts against the country in 2025, potentially targeting energy infrastructure or aid sent to Ukraine.

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