16,000 Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine since April

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Some 16,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine since April as the death rate on the front lines has been climbing this year.
The new figures come from a data project carried out by the BBC’s Russia service and independent Russian media outlet Mediazona.
The project only records deaths it has been able to identify from official reports, the media and satellite analysis of Russian graveyards, so the numbers are likely to be a conservative estimate of total deaths. 
Mediazona said that “as of August 30, we know the names of 66,471 Russian soldiers killed in the war”. Previously, in April, it announced it had found more than 50,000 names of Russians killed.
In June, the Ministry of Defence estimated that Russia had sustained 70,000 casualties in the two months prior, and predicted that Russia would continue to record an average of 1,000 casualties a day due over the coming months due to an increase in Russian pressure across the front line. Casualties are defined as deaths or injuries.
Mediazona said that a 4,600 increase in deaths over the last four weeks was not linked to Ukraine’s Kursk incursion or Russia’s advance in the east, as researchers were still working though a backlog of death reports. 
Today’s live coverage has ended. Here’s a roundup of the main events: 
Ukraine’s defence minister has said that the dismissal of former air force chief Mykola Oleshchuk was not connected to the death of Oleksiy Mes, a star Ukrainian pilot who was killed when a US-supplied F-16 fighter jet crashed on Monday. 
“I would probably say this is a rotation. This is two separate issues… at this stage, I would not connect them,” Rustem Umierov told US broadcaster CNN. 
“We’re analyzing what has happened,” said Umerov. “We’ve also opened this file to our partners so they are also analyzing this and investigating along with us.”
Volodymy Zelensky did not say whether his decision to fire Mykola Oleshchuk was related to the F-16 crash. 
A Russian bomb attack on Saturday killed two civilians and wounded eight more in a village in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, the governor said.
Oleh Synehubov said on Telegram that Russian forces hit the village of Cherkaska Lozova with guided bombs, damaging a residential building. 
He added that rescuers and medics were working to clear up the debris and help the injured. 
A similar Russian attack on the city of Kharkiv, the regional centre, killed seven people on Friday, local authorities reported.
Russia claimed on Saturday to have destroyed a Ukrainian warehouse holding rocket and artillery ammunition near to the village of Nizhnyaya Syrovatka, 3 miles south of the city of Sumy.
At least five civilians were killed by a Russian strike on Chasiv Yar on Saturday morning, the head of the Donetsk regional military administration said.  
Vadym Filashkin wrote on Telegram: “At least five people were killed in the attack on Chasiv Yar. The Russians attacked the city this morning, with projectiles hitting a house and an apartment building.”
The dead were all men and aged between 24 and 28, he added. 
Mr Filashkin also urged residents to evacuate the city, which is located close to the frontline and roughly six miles from Russian-occupied Bakhmut. 
“Chasiv Yar has been unable to experience normal life for over two years. Don’t make yourself a Russian target! Evacuate!”
The White House has rejected a US military proposal to send civilian staff to Ukraine to maintain F-16 fighter jets and other donated equipment, US media reports. 
According to the Wall Street Journal, the US National Security Council considered the plan, but intelligence officials deemed it too risky. 
“The intelligence community raised concerns over the prospect of Russia targeting American contractors in Ukraine,” one US official was quoted as saying. 
The newspaper added that the White House has not ruled out sending American contractors to Ukraine in the future, but that it hoped European countries would take on the responsibility of maintaining the F-16s. 
The Danish prime minister has criticised the delay in sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, saying she was ready to provide the aircraft at the start of the war. 
Addressing the Globsec security conference in Prague on Saturday, Mette Frederiksen said: “I’m sorry that it took so long. I was ready to deliver them from the beginning of the war. 
“But, once again, we had quite long discussions about whether it was a good idea or not.”
Ukraine received its first batch of F-16s at the beginning of August, a delivery of six aircraft. 
The Ukrainian military has confirmed that one of these was lost in a crash on August 26. The pilot, Lt Col Oleksiy Mes, was killed in the incident. 
Ukrainian rescuers are pictured carrying an elderly woman from a building in Kharkiv after a Russian strike on Friday. At least seven people were killed and 97 injured in the attack (see our post at 10.00am).
Ukrainian air defences shot down 24 out of 52 drones launched by Russia at the country overnight, Kyiv’s air force said. 
It added that of the remaining drones, 25 fell out of the sky on their own and three others flew towards Russia and Belarus. There were no reports of injuries or any major damage. 
Air raid sirens sounded several times during the night, with many people rushing to shelters. 
In Kyiv, which saw its fourth drone attack of the week, the alert lasted for around four hours. The city authorities said that all drones targeting the city were destroyed and no damage was caused. 
Air defences also shot down Russian drones in the Poltava, Cherkasy, Kyrovohrad and Dnipropetrovsk regions in central Ukraine, in the Chernihiv and Sumy regions in the north and the Mykolayiv region in the south.
Drone debris damaged several houses in Cherkasy, local officials said. 
Russian forces also launched five missiles during the attack, the air force said, but gave no other details.
Five people were killed and 46 injured in a Ukrainian attack on the southwestern Russian city of Belgorod late on Friday, the local governor said. 
Vyacheslav Gladkov said that 37 of the injured, including seven children, were taken to hospital.
Russian authorities also said that a woman was injured on Saturday during Ukrainian shelling of the border town of Shebekino in the Belgorod region.
At least seven people were killed and 97 others injured in a Russian guided bomb attack on Kharkiv on Friday, Ukrainian authorities said, raising the death toll from an earlier figure of 6. 
Among the dead was a 14-year-old girl, regional governor Oleh Syniehubov said. He added that she was killed in a strike on the city’s Kharkiv’s Nemyshlianskyi district. 
Ukraine’s state emergency service said 22 children were injured. 
In a renewed call on Western allies to allow long-range attacks on Russia, Volodymyr Zelensky said that the attack “would not have happened if our defence forces had the ability to destroy Russian military aircraft where they are based”. 
Welcome to our live coverage. We’ll be keeping you up to date with events in Ukraine throughout the day.