Tag: weapons

As the war enters its 833rd day, these are the main developments.

Here is the situation on Friday, June 7, 2024.

Fighting

• Vadym Filashkin, the governor of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, said one woman was killed and three people injured in Chasiv Yar, which is under assault from Russian forces. Filashkin also ordered the evacuation of children and their guardians from several towns and villages in the region as a result of the “constantly deteriorating” security situation.
• The Ukrainian air force said it shot down 17 out of 18 Shahed-type drones in a Russian attack targeting four regions of the country. A shot-down drone triggered a fire at an infrastructure facility in the Khmelnytskyi region, but there were no reports of casualties or other damage.
• Russia launched two Iskander-M ballistic missiles on Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, the military said. There were no reports of damage.
• Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence agency said it destroyed a Russian tugboat off the coast of Russian-occupied Crimea.
• Russia’s TASS news agency, citing the Ministry of Defence, said Russian forces had captured a Colombian national who was fighting alongside Ukrainian soldiers. It published a video of the man in which he urged other Colombians not to join the war.
• Sergiy Zhadan, one of Ukraine’s most celebrated writers and poets, announced he had joined the country’s military. The 49-year-old said he was undergoing training.

Politics and diplomacy

• United States President Joe Biden made an impassioned call for the defence of freedom and democracy as he joined European leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to mark the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings. Biden said it was “simply unthinkable” to surrender to Russian aggression, and he promised no letup in support for Ukraine.
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also attended the ceremonies in Normandy, from where tens of thousands of allied soldiers began an offensive in 1944 to defeat Nazi Germany. He also drew parallels with today’s situation in Europe and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “Allies defended Europe’s freedom then, and Ukrainians do so now. Unity prevailed then, and true unity can prevail today,” he wrote on social media platform X.
• Separately, Zelenskyy said he had spoken to India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his election victory and urged India to participate in the June 15-16 Ukraine peace conference in Switzerland.
• Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said Hungary would attend the peace summit, which aims to build support for Zelenskyy’s peace proposals, which include the full withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine. Hungary has maintained close ties with Russia even as other members of the European Union have sought to distance themselves since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
• Visiting Beijing, Ukraine’s First Deputy Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiga urged the Chinese state and private companies to “take a more active part in helping Ukraine” and boost trade and investment.
• Ukraine’s hydroelectric company Ukrhydroenergo said it had initiated international arbitration seeking damages over Russia’s alleged destruction of the Kakhovka Dam and power station a year ago. The state-run company said damage was estimated at 2.5 billion euros ($2.72bn).
• Ukrainian prosecutors in northeastern Kharkiv said a former Ukrainian soldier who sent the location of sensitive military targets to Russia had been jailed for five years. They did not name the man.

Weapons

• President Macron said France will transfer Mirage-2000 fighter jets to Ukraine and train their Ukrainian pilots as part of a new military cooperation with Kyiv. Macron did not specify the number of planes or when they would be sent, but said the pilot training was likely to take place in the coming weeks.
• The French president also said that Ukraine has asked its Western allies to send military instructors to train its forces on its soil. Macron said France and Ukraine’s other partners would decide on their next steps together.
• The US will send about $225m in military aid to Ukraine, including munitions for the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), as well as mortar systems and a variety of artillery rounds, several officials told The Associated Press news agency on condition of anonymity.

As the war enters its 831st day, these are the main developments.

Here is the situation on Wednesday, June 5, 2024.

Fighting

• At least eight people were injured, including a one-month-old baby, after a Russian missile attack on Ukraine’s central city of Dnipro.
• Andriy Yermak, the Ukrainian president’s chief of staff, said the United States’s move to allow Kyiv to use Western weapons to strike inside Russia was a “vital decision” that would weaken Russia in its border areas and enable Ukraine to better defend its territory in the northeastern region of Kharkiv.
• Ukraine held a day of remembrance for the hundreds of children killed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska urged the country’s allies to supply the military with more weapons to fend off Russian attacks and prevent such deaths. The United Nations says more than 600 children have been confirmed dead in the war, but the real figure is considerably higher.

Politics and diplomacy

• A senior official in the US Department of Treasury said the US and its Group of Seven (G7) partners were making progress on finding ways to provide more urgently-needed funds to Ukraine through the profits earned on $300bn in frozen Russian assets. The White House said the issue would be discussed at the G7 summit in Italy on June 13-14.
• The office of French President Emmanuel Macron said he would hold talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Paris on Friday and “discuss the situation on the ground” in Ukraine. Zelenskyy will also address France’s National Assembly.

• A Russian military court in the northern Karelia region bordering Finland sentenced a man to 14 years in prison for state treason, saying he had set fire to railway infrastructure on Ukrainian orders, according to the Interfax news agency. The man was not named.
• A Russian court extended the pre-trial detention of Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American journalist in Prague with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, by two months in a move her husband called unjust. The decision was handed down on Friday. Kurmasheva has been in custody in the Tatarstan region since October 18.
• Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the planned peace conference for Ukraine taking place in Switzerland from June 15-16 was “absurd”. Switzerland has said more than 80 delegations have confirmed their attendance. Russia, which insists talks must start based on its occupation of about 18 percent of Ukraine, has not been invited. China has said it will not attend.

Weapons

• Russia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov said any French military instructors training soldiers in Ukraine would be an “absolutely legitimate target” for Russian attacks. France does not officially have military personnel assisting or training Ukrainian forces in Ukraine at the moment, but Kyiv said last week it was “in talks” with Paris on the issue.
• Ukraine’s anticorruption agency said the former director of Ukrspetsexport, Ukraine’s state-run defence firm, faces trial after arranging to buy aeroplane parts at a price inflated seven-fold while in charge of arms imports in 2016. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) did not name the man.

As the war enters its 829th day, these are the main developments.

Here is the situation on Monday, June 3, 2024.

Fighting

• Ukraine imposed emergency power shutdowns in all but three regions of the country a day after Russia unleashed large-scale attacks on energy facilities, which also injured 19 people.
• Russia’s Ministry of Defence claimed that its armed forces had taken over Umanske in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. The tiny village had fewer than 180 residents before Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and lies about 25km (15 miles) to the northwest of Donetsk, which is the main city of the region and under Russian occupation.
• Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, said six people were injured in Ukrainian shelling of the region, just across the border from Kharkiv. A local official also died when some ammunition detonated, he said.
• Almost 1,000 people gathered in central Kyiv to remember Iryna Tsybukh, known as Cheka, a 25-year-old high-profile journalist and volunteer paramedic who was killed in action in the northeastern Kharkiv region last week.

Politics and diplomacy

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told defence and security leaders in Singapore that the Switzerland peace summit scheduled for later this month was the best way to end the “cruel war” in Ukraine and that he was disappointed China would not be attending. He said he had not been able to meet the Chinese delegation in Singapore. China’s foreign affairs minister, Wang Yi, said on Friday that China, which claims to be neutral in the war but has deepened ties with Moscow, would not be taking part.
• Zelenskyy and his defence minister, Rustem Umerov, held talks with United States Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin for more than an hour on Sunday. He also met Indonesia’s President-elect Prabowo Subianto and the president of East Timor, Jose Ramos-Horta.
• German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said NATO’s recent move to strengthen defences in the Baltic states was aimed at deterring Russia, and a signal that the security alliance would “defend every square inch of NATO territory against attacks”.
• Russia’s TASS news agency said former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, who fled the country a decade ago for fear of persecution, could be targeted for allegedly violating the Kremlin’s “foreign agent” law. Moscow added Kasparov, a prominent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, to its list of individuals supposedly acting as foreign agents soon after it began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Weapons

• White House National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby confirmed that US President Joe Biden had agreed to allow Ukraine to use some weapons provided by the US to strike inside Russia.

An apartment building was among sites hit in Ukraine’s second-biggest city with at least 16 people reported injured.

At least three people have been killed and 16 injured after Russian missiles hit at least three sites including a five-storey apartment building in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-biggest city.

Regional Governor Oleh Syniehubov said the missiles, all thought to be S-300s, also hit a shop in a three-storey building and a garment factory in the city’s Novobazarskyi district.

Syniehubov said the attacks were “double tap” style, with a second strike hitting a site soon after the first at a time when emergency teams are usually at work.

The attack took place at about midnight local time (21:00 GMT).

Syniehubov said at least two children were among those injured, as well as an emergency medic, and warned that residents could be trapped beneath the rubble of the building.

“The third, fourth and fifth floors are destroyed, stairwells were destroyed, facades were destroyed,” Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov told public broadcaster Suspilne, describing the damage.

Kharkiv Police Chief Volodymyr Tymoshko told Suspilne that he expected the death toll to rise given the scale of the destruction and the likelihood of shrapnel injuries.

Kharkiv, which lies not far from the border with Russia’s Belgorod region, has come under renewed attack in recent weeks. Some 17 people were killed last weekend when Russia, which began an offensive in the region earlier this month, bombed a hardware superstore in the city.

Kharkiv, which had a population of about 1.5 million people before the war, withstood Russian advances in the early weeks of its February 2022 invasion.

Moscow claims it does not deliberately target civilians.

Officials revealed on Thursday in the United States that President Joe Biden had lifted restrictions on Ukraine using US-supplied weapons against targets on Russian territory, saying they could be used on Russian troops and military sites in areas bordering the Kharkiv region.

As the war enters its 826th day, these are the main developments.

Here is the situation on Friday, May 31, 2024.

Fighting

• At least three people were killed and 16 injured after Russia struck three sites, including a five-storey apartment building, in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, at about midnight local time (21:00 GMT). Regional Governor Oleh Syniehubov said at least two children were among the injured. Earlier in the day, at least four people were injured in Russian shelling of the city.
• Ukraine’s top military commander Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskii said Russia was continuing to send additional regiments and brigades from other areas and training grounds to boost its forces along two main lines of attack in the north of the Kharkiv region, where Moscow launched an offensive earlier this month.
• United States officials, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issues, told multiple media outlets that President Joe Biden had decided to allow Kyiv to use US-supplied weapons at targets inside Russia but only on the border with the northeastern Kharkiv region.
• Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence service said its forces destroyed two Russian patrol boats using naval drones off Crimea, which Russia occupied and annexed from Ukraine in 2014. Moscow said earlier it had destroyed two naval drones “heading for Crimea”.
• Russia fired a total of 51 missiles and drones at “military facilities and critical infrastructure”, across Ukraine, the air force said. Air defences destroyed seven missiles and 32 drones, it added.

Politics and diplomacy

• The 27 members of the European Union agreed to impose “prohibitive” tariffs on grain imports from Russia and Belarus in a bid to cut off Moscow’s funding for its war on Ukraine. Grain in transit to other parts of the world through Europe will not be affected by the tariffs.
• Ukrainian lawmakers and journalists called for an investigation into political pressure on the country’s state news agency Ukrinform. Oleksiy Matsuka, the agency’s head, stepped down this week after being accused of leading an editorial policy exclusively backing the presidential administration. He was replaced by a former army spokesman, Serhiy Cherevaty, deepening concerns about official censorship.
• Tharaka Balasuriya, Sri Lanka’s junior foreign minister, said Colombo would start talks with Moscow to secure the release of hundreds of citizens, mostly former soldiers, who it believes were duped into joining Russian forces in Ukraine. It is also seeking the release of about a dozen men being held as prisoners of war in Ukraine. At least 16 men have been killed in the fighting.
• Russia’s FSB security service said it detained four people in Crimea who were allegedly involved in a series of sabotage attacks planned by Ukrainian special services to destroy railway lines in the occupied peninsula. A fifth man, reported to be the group’s leader by Russian news agencies, was killed when the FSB tried to capture him.

Weapons

• German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius made an unannounced visit to Ukraine’s southern city of Odesa where he held talks with Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov and promised Ukraine a new package of military aid worth 500 million euros ($540m), a spokesperson for the ministry told the AFP news agency. The package includes “artillery, air defence [and] drones”, he added.
• A Czech official said Ukraine would receive between 50,000 and 100,000 shells in June under a Czech-led ammunition supply initiative.

As the war enters its 825th day, these are the main developments.

Here is the situation on Thursday, May 30, 2024.

Fighting

• Ukraine reported that nine people were killed in Russian attacks in five regions of the country, including two in Nikopol in southern Ukraine. One of the dead was an ambulance driver whose vehicle was hit by a Russian drone. The man’s wife, who was travelling with him, was injured. Nikopol is located just across the river from the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
• Ukraine’s Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said search and recovery efforts at a Kharkiv hardware superstore hit by Russian bombs last weekend had ended. The death toll rose to 19 after a man who was severely burned in the attack died in hospital.
• US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that weapons provided by the United States were helping Ukraine stabilise the front line amid intensifying Russian attacks and that Washington would “adapt and adjust” its approach to military support in line with battlefield developments.

Politics and diplomacy

• US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell accused China of supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine. Campbell said Chinese assistance was helping Moscow reconstitute elements of its military, including long-range missile, artillery and drone capabilities, and its ability to track battlefield movements. European and NATO countries needed “to send a collective message of concern to China about its actions, which we view are destabilising in the heart of Europe”, he said. Beijing says it is neutral in the war but has deepened its relationship with Russia since the country launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
• Wally Adeyemo, deputy secretary of the US Treasury, met Ukrainian officials in Kyiv to discuss US financial support, enforcing sanctions on Russia and using frozen Russian assets for Ukraine’s benefit in its war against Moscow.
• Dmitry Suslov, a senior researcher at the Council for Foreign and Defence Policy, a Russian think tank that is close to the Kremlin, said Moscow should consider a “demonstrative” nuclear explosion to cow the West into refusing to allow Ukraine to use its arms against targets inside Russia.
• Belarus’s President Alexander Lukashenko joined Moscow in suspending the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) that limits the number of tanks, combat aircraft and other military equipment that can be deployed in Europe. Belarus borders Ukraine and Russia and hosted Russian soldiers before Moscow began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
• Polish security services arrested a man suspected of trying to obtain photos of military vehicles crossing the border into Ukraine, as well as three men, two of them Belarusian citizens, accused of committing arson on the orders of Russian intelligence.
• Prominent Russian nationalist and former militia commander Igor Girkin lost his appeal against a four-year jail term over his criticism of the conduct of the war in Ukraine, the RIA Novosti state news agency reported.

Weapons

As the war enters its 824th day, these are the main developments.

Here is the situation on Wednesday May 29, 2024.

Fighting

• Regional Governor Vadym Filashkin said at least two people were killed after Russian guided bombs struck apartment buildings in the eastern Ukrainian city of Toretsk, which lies to the north of the Russian-occupied regional centre of Donetsk. Filashkin said rescue teams were on site to determine the extent of the casualties, posting photos of the destructions. Donetsk regional prosecutors said a third guided bomb struck Oleksievo-Druzhkivka, a town northwest of Toretsk, injuring six people.
• The governor of Ukraine’s southern Kherson region said one person was killed in Russian shelling of a village north of the city of Kherson.
• Ukraine’s military said Russian forces had launched 25 assaults along the 1,200km (750-mile) front line, with the heaviest fighting in the Pokrovsk sector, northwest of Donetsk.

Politics and diplomacy

• Russian President Vladimir Putin warned of “serious consequences”, and stressed his country’s nuclear strength, if Ukraine’s Western allies allowed weapons supplied to Kyiv to be used to attack targets inside Russia. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told The Economist in an interview last week that alliance members should let Ukraine strike deep into Russia with Western weapons, a view supported by some NATO members but not by the United States. Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and currently occupies about 18 percent of the country.
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Putin would applaud Joe Biden’s absence if the US president did not attend Kyiv’s Swiss peace summit next month. Switzerland has invited more than 160 delegations and the US has said it will send an official, but not their identity.
• Poland’s Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski told the Gazeta Wyborcza daily that Warsaw should not exclude the possibility of sending troops to Ukraine and should keep Putin guessing about whether such a decision would ever be made.

Weapons

• Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov told the Reuters news agency that the country will receive its first supplies of F-16 fighter jets “very soon”, but that about half of its desperately needed foreign military aid was arriving late, at a time when Russia was intensifying its front-line campaign with more troops and more equipment.
• Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said a Czech-led initiative to speed up ammunition deliveries to Ukraine had raised 1.6 billion euros ($1.74bn), and the first deliveries of 155 mm (calibre) ammunition would arrive there in a matter of days.
• Portugal will provide military support to Ukraine worth at least 126 million euros ($137m) this year under a security pact signed in Lisbon between Ukrainian President Zelenskyy and Portuguese Prime Minister Luis Montenegro.

As the war enters its 823rd day, these are the main developments.

Here is the situation on Tuesday, May 28, 2024.

Fighting

• Three people were killed and six injured in a Russian missile attack on the town of Snihurivka in Ukraine’s southern Mykolaiv region, according to the emergency services and the local governor.

• The Kharkiv regional prosecutor’s office said at least one woman was killed and 11 injured in a Russian guided bomb attack that struck a sweet factory in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-biggest city.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian forces had dropped about 3,200 guided aerial bombs on Ukraine this month and that Kyiv did not have enough air defence missiles to stop attacks on such a scale.

• Russia’s Ministry of Defence said its forces captured two villages – Ivanivka in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region and Netailove in eastern Donetsk. There was no comment from Ukraine on the claims.
• Ukraine launched two attacks on the Russian-occupied city of Luhansk in its east, triggering a fire, according to Russian-appointed officials. Ukraine made no official comment on either incident. Ukrainian news outlets said the target of the second strike was an airfield.
• Russia and Belarus will hold joint air force and air defence ministry drills from May 27-31, the Belarusian Ministry of Defence said.

Politics and diplomacy

• Zelenskyy excluded Russia’s participation in next month’s peace summit in Switzerland. “We do not see Russia there, because Russia will block everything. It’s clear,” he said, adding that Moscow “does not benefit from peace. It wants to destroy Ukraine and move on.”
• The European Union imposed sanctions on the media outlet Voice of Europe, its funder Viktor Medvedchuk and “covert head” Artem Marchevskyi, extending penalties imposed by the Czech Republic, which says the Prague-based platform is a Russian influence operation “to undermine the territorial integrity, sovereignty and freedom of Ukraine”. Medvedchuk is a pro-Kremlin oligarch and former Ukrainian lawmaker who was sent to  Russia in 2022 in exchange for Ukrainian prisoners of war and stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship.
• A German court jailed Thomas H, a former army captain who was stationed at a military procurement office in Koblenz, for three and a half years after finding him guilty of spying for Russia. Judges found the 54-year-old had handed over internal documents to Russia’s consulate in Bonn last May and offered to provide more material in future.

Weapons

• Spain pledged 1 billion euros ($1.1bn) in military aid, including Patriot missiles and Leopard tanks, to Ukraine as Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and Zelenskyy signed a security deal in Madrid. Sanchez said the agreement would boost Ukraine’s capabilities including much-needed air defence.
• Zelenskyy will visit Belgium on Tuesday and sign a security pact with Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, the Belgian government said. The agreements, signed with several European allies, promise long-term security assistance in the form of arms supplies and training for Kyiv’s forces.

• Ukraine’s top commander Oleksandr Syrskii said he had signed paperwork that would allow French military instructors to visit Ukrainian training centres soon, and said he hoped others would join what he described as an “ambitious project”. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence said later that discussions on the use of foreign instructors were continuing with France and other countries.