Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday visited the Sumy region close to the Russian frontier, near where Ukrainian forces launched their cross-border Kursk offensive. The Ukrainian leader said that Russian soldiers captured during the incursion would help build an “exchange fund” to swap for Ukrainian prisoners. Meanwhile, Russia kept on pressing its offensive against the strategic town of Pokrovsk in Donbas. Read our liveblog to see how all the day's events unfolded
This liveblog is no longer being updated.
Summary:
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he went to border areas in Sumy region on Thursday, just across the frontier from Russia's Kursk region, where Ukrainian troops are staging an unprecedented offensive.
-
Russian forces mounted 53 attacks on enemy positions on the Pokrovsk front in eastern Ukraine on Thursday as Moscow pressed to take a strategic town, Ukraine’s military said.
-
Ukraine sank a Russian ferry carrying fuel tanks in an aerial attack on a southern Russian port next to the annexed Crimean peninsula on Thursday, Russian officials said.
-
Moscow said Thursday that it had foiled several Ukrainian drone and missile attacks in the west of the country, including in the Volgograd region, where local authorities said a fire had broken out at a military facility.
Yesterday's key developments:
- Russian air defences shot down 10 Ukrainian drones over Moscow during one of the largest drone attacks ever on the Russian capital, the city's mayor said.
- There will be no talks between Moscow and Kyiv until Ukraine is completely defeated following its incursion into Russia's Kursk region, according to Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Russia's security council.
- Russia's army said its forces had captured another village in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region, where it is advancing even as Kyiv mounts a major counterattack into Russian territory.
- Ukraine's parliament voted to join the International Criminal Court, which prosecutes serious crimes including genocide and crimes against humanity.
- Ukraine's offensive in the Kursk region was planned with the help of intelligence from the US, Britain and Poland, the Russian newspaper Izvestia reported, citing the country's foreign intelligence agency. The White House has previously said it had no advance notice that Ukraine planned the incursion into Russian territory.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP, AP and Reuters)
