Here is how things stand on Tuesday, September 9:

Fighting

• Russian attacks killed four people and injured 10 in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, Governor Vadym Filashkin said in a post on Telegram on Monday.
• Two people were killed and one person was injured as Russian forces launched 449 strikes on 17 settlements in Ukraine’s Zaporizhia region, Governor Ivan Fedorov said.
• Ukrainian forces launched a “massive” drone attack on Russian-occupied Donetsk, killing two civilians, Russia’s state TASS news agency reported, citing local officials.
• Ukrainian forces recaptured the village of Zarichne in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, the General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces reported in a post on Facebook.
• Russian forces attacked a thermal power generation facility in the Kyiv region overnight, causing localised blackouts and gas outages, Ukraine’s Ministry of Energy said.
• Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said it detained a citizen of Azerbaijan, alleging he was working with Ukraine to conduct reconnaissance missions for possible attacks on government buildings in Russia’s cities of Yessentuki and Stavropol.
• The Russian Ministry of Defence said that its forces shot down 195 Ukrainian drones and two aerial bombs in a 24-hour period, TASS reported.

Sanctions

• The European Union’s plan for new sanctions against Russia is being closely coordinated with the United States, EU Council President Antonio Costa said.
• Costa’s remarks came as the EU’s top sanctions official, David O’Sullivan, visited Washington, DC, with a team of experts, to discuss possible coordinated sanctions.
• The Kremlin responded to the EU announcement, saying sanctions would not force Russia to change course in the war.
• “No sanctions will be able to force the Russian Federation to change the consistent position that our president has repeatedly spoken about,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told Kremlin reporter Alexander Yunashev.

Politics and diplomacy

• The Czech Republic will expel a Belarusian diplomat it has accused of espionage, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. “We will not tolerate the abuse of diplomatic cover for secret service activities,” the ministry said in a post on X.
• The Czech counterintelligence service said that, together with Romanian and Hungarian services, it had “broken up a Belarusian intelligence network being built in Europe”.

• European countries should “adjust” their interests “without false nostalgia” and “expand and strengthen existing [partnerships] even more aggressively than we have done so far,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said, regarding Europe’s changing relationship with the United States.

• A German government spokesperson said that Russia’s “ongoing escalation of the war” on Ukraine shows that Russian President Vladimir Putin “does not want to negotiate”, and the war “can only be stopped by enabling Ukraine to maintain its defence and not allowing Putin to succeed”.