Tag: military

As the war enters its 844th day, these are the main developments.

Here is the situation on Tuesday, June 18, 2024.

Fighting

• At least 22 people, including three children, were injured in a Russian missile attack on Ukraine’s east-central Poltava region. Poltava Governor Filip Pronin posted footage of himself at the scene of the attack, which he said caused major damage to residential buildings and cut power supplies to thousands of people.
• Regional authorities in the southern region of Kherson, which is partially occupied by Russia, said a 50-year-old civilian was killed in a Russian drone attack.
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Kyiv’s forces were pushing Russian troops out of the northeastern Kharkiv region where Moscow seized several villages near the border last month. Vitaly Ganchev, a Russia-appointed official in occupied areas of the Kharkiv region, said Ukraine’s military was pouring men and equipment into the area and that the “fiercest clashes” were in Vovchansk, 5km (three miles) inside the border, and near Lyptsy.

Politics and diplomacy

• Russian President Vladimir Putin will arrive in Pyongyang on Tuesday for a two-day visit as the two countries deepen their relationship. In a letter published in North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party’s Rodong Sinmun newspaper, Putin thanked the country for supporting the war in Ukraine and promised support for Pyongyang’s efforts to defend its interests despite what he called “US pressure, blackmail and military threats”.
• US Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich will go on trial on June 26 in the city of Yekaterinburg. The Sverdlovsk Regional Court said the trial will be held “behind closed doors”. Gershkovich, who has been jailed since his arrest in March last year, is accused of spying. He and the Wall Street Journal deny the charges. Washington has designated the reporter as “arbitrarily detained”.  The Kremlin said that contacts had taken place with the United States over a possible prisoner exchange involving Gershkovich.
• NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg accused China of “fuelling the largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II” even as it seeks to maintain good relations with the West, arguing that the security alliance needed to impose costs on China over its support for Russia. The US last week imposed sanctions on several Chinese companies it said were involved in the sale of dual-use technologies to Russia. Beijing says it is neutral in the war, but has not condemned Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine.

• Putin sacked four deputy defence ministers in a continuing reshuffle that began last month when he unexpectedly removed longstanding defence minister Sergei Shoigu. Anna Tsivileva, the daughter of Putin’s late cousin, was among those appointed to replace them. Her responsibilities will include improving social and housing support for military personnel. She previously headed a state fund to support those involved in the war in Ukraine.
• A fleet of Russian vessels, including a nuclear-powered submarine, left Havana’s port after a five-day visit to Cuba following military drills in the Atlantic Ocean. Their next destination was unclear, although US officials have said that they could possibly also stop in Venezuela.

Weapons

• One soldier was killed and eight other people injured in an explosion at a Czech military base where Ukrainian troops have been training since late 2022. Military police spokeswoman Katerina Mlynkova told the AFP news agency the soldiers involved “were not foreigners”.

As the war enters its 843rd day, these are the main developments.

Here is the situation on Monday, June 17, 2024.

Fighting

• Seven people, including two young boys, were injured in a Russian attack on the village of Nova Poltavka village in the eastern Donetsk region, according to the regional prosecutor’s office.

Politics and diplomacy

• Dozens of countries backed Ukraine’s territorial integrity within its internationally-recognised borders, and urged dialogue for a lasting settlement after a two-day peace-building summit in Switzerland. Saudi Arabia, India, South Africa, Thailand, Indonesia, Mexico and the United Arab Emirates did not sign up to the statement. Switzerland said it was prepared to host a follow-up summit.
• The final communique also included a call for the full exchange of prisoners of war, and the return of Ukrainian children deported to Russia. Kyiv says that as many as 20,000 children have been taken to Russia or Russian-occupied territory without the consent of family or guardians since Moscow began its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
• At a news conference after the summit, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said China should communicate its peace proposals on ending the war to Ukraine directly, instead of doing so via media outlets. Beijing did not send a representative to the summit.
• The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) warned in its annual yearbook that diplomatic efforts to control nuclear arms had suffered major setbacks amid strained international relations over the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, noting that Moscow had suspended its participation in the New START treaty, and staged tactical nuclear drills.
• About 500 people gathered in Kyiv under heavy police guard for the Ukrainian capital’s first Pride march since Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Weapons

• Zelenskyy said the current level of Western military aid being sent to Ukraine was not enough to ensure Kyiv’s victory against Russia forces.

As the war enters its 840th day, these are the main developments.

Here is the situation on Friday, June 14, 2024.

Fighting

• The Ukrainian military said its forces were fighting fierce battles near Chasiv Yar, a strategic hilltop settlement in Donetsk, and the situation was “tense”. A civilian was killed further south on the front line near Pokrovsk, while another man was killed by Russian fire in the southern Kherson region.
• Russian journalist Valery Kozhin, who worked for Russia’s state-run NTV television channel, was killed in Ukrainian shelling of a Russian-occupied village in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region, Russian news agencies reported, quoting the mayor of the town of Horlivka near where the incident took place. NTV reported earlier that three of its staff, including Kozhin, had been injured and taken to hospital.
• US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Russia’s advance in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region was slowing and the front line was stabilising after some allies lifted restrictions on Kyiv’s use of donated weapons inside Russian territory.

Politics and diplomacy

• Group of Seven (G7) nations meeting in Italy agreed to provide financial support of $50bn to Ukraine by the end of the year, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said. The deal will be funded from profits on frozen Russian assets.
• United States’ President Joe Biden and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed a 10-year bilateral security agreement aimed at bolstering Ukraine’s defence against Russia’s invasion and moving Ukraine closer to NATO membership.
• Ukraine also signed a 10-year security agreement with Japan. “In 2024, Japan will provide Ukraine with $4.5 billion and will continue to support us throughout the agreement’s entire 10-year term,” Zelenskyy said on X. The deal, he added, envisages security and defence assistance, humanitarian aid, technical and financial cooperation.
• The United Nations’ refugee agency UNHCR said in an annual report that about 750,000 people became newly displaced inside Ukraine last year as a result of Russia’s full-scale invasion, with a total of 3.7 million internally displaced people registered by the end of 2023. The number of Ukrainian refugees and asylum seekers increased by more than 275,000 to six million, it said.
• Human rights organisation Global Rights Compliance said in a report that Russian forces deliberately used starvation of civilians as a military tactic during the 85-day siege of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol in 2022. The report found Russian forces “systematically attacked objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population” such as food, water, energy and access to healthcare, and also cut off evacuation routes and blocked humanitarian aid from coming in.
• Russian prosecutors said they would send Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter detained in March 2023, for trial, accusing the 32-year-old of collecting information for the US CIA about a Russian tank factory. Gershkovich, who is being held in custody, has denied wrongdoing. His employer said the charge was “false and baseless” and built on lies. Biden called his detention “totally illegal”. Prosecutors did not say when the trial would start.

• The judge in the trial of director Zhenya Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk, two leading figures in Russian theatre, agreed to a prosecution request to close the trial to the public and the media over unspecified “threats” to witnesses. The two were arrested in May last year and accused of “justifying terrorism” over their production of an award-winning play about Russian women who married Islamic State fighters. The women have pleaded not guilty and say the play was about preventing terrorism.

• German Moyzhes, a 39-year-old lawyer with dual Russian-German citizenship, was detained in Saint Petersburg with some Russian independent media reporting that he was suspected of treason. The German Federal Foreign Office told the Reuters news agency that its embassy in Moscow was in contact with Moyzhes’s family. There was no official word from Russia on the detention.

• Russia’s Admiral Gorshkov frigate and the nuclear-powered submarine Kazan, accompanied by a tug boat and a fuel ship, arrived in Cuba for a five-day visit seen as a show of force by Moscow amid rising tension over its invasion of Ukraine.

Weaponry

• Zelenskyy told a news conference in Italy that Chinese President Xi Jinping had given him his assurance in a phone call that China would not sell weapons to Russia. Speaking in English, Zelenskyy said Xi had told him that “he will not sell any weapon to Russia”. Zelenskyy did not say when the conversation took place. The last publicly known phone call between Zelenskyy and Xi was in April 2023.
• The Dutch Ministry of Defence said Kyiv’s allies will send Ukraine about 350 million euros ($376.74m) worth of 152mm shells.
• Canadian Defence Minister Bill Blair said the country would start sending a total of about 2,000 surplus unarmed rockets to Ukraine as well as a selection of other weapons.