What did 20 March 2024 show about the war?

What did the war look like on 20 March 2024? On that date, a Russian missile strike killed at least five people and injured eight others in an industrial area of Kharkiv, Ukraine. The strike came at the end of a week in which violence was reported on several fronts and in several places.

The days before Kharkiv

On 14 March 2024, Russian-installed officials at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Enerhodar said shelling had hit critical infrastructure at the plant. They said such attacks were unacceptable. The plant lies in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, parts of which Russia has occupied since the invasion of mainland Ukraine out of Crimea on 24 February 2022. Russia declared the annexation of the Russian-controlled parts of the oblast on 30 September 2022.

On 15 March 2024, a Russian double tap missile strike on Odesa killed at least 20 people and injured at least 73 others. A double tap strike hits a site and then strikes again.

On 16 March 2024, Russia said two civilians had been killed by Ukrainian shelling in the city of Belgorod.

On 17 March 2024, a drone reportedly hit a military base in Transnistria and destroyed an Mi-8 helicopter. That report placed an incident in a region beyond Ukraine's borders.

A week in sequence

Set side by side, the reports from 14 to 20 March 2024 cover a nuclear plant, a port city, a Russian border city, a breakaway region and an industrial district in Kharkiv. The Odesa strike caused the most casualties of the reported incidents, and the Kharkiv strike on 20 March 2024 came five days after it.

The reports do not tie these incidents into a single story, and this retrospective does not either. What they record is how many places were affected within a few days, and that civilians were among the dead in Odesa, Kharkiv and Belgorod, according to the accounts at the time.