Russia said Wednesday that one person was killed and another 41 injured, including two children, by Ukrainian fire in the east Ukraine town of Makiivka, which is occupied by Russian forces.
Overnight residential buildings and a medical facility were damaged by a Russian rocket attack on Druzhkivka in the Donetsk region.
Russia’s Kursk and Belgorod regions came under fire from Ukrainian forces across the border in the early hours of Wednesday, the regions’ governors said, adding that no casualties were reported.
Ukrainian officials said at least 43 people, including 12 children, were wounded in a Russian missile strike on Tuesday which an officer said targeted a military funeral in the north-eastern Kharkiv region. The strike hit a parking lot outside a residential building in the town of around 28,000 people.
Russian state-owned news agency Tass reported Wednesday that the website and mobile app of the Russian railways network has been subjected to “a massive hacker attack”.
Yelena Milashina, the prominent journalist for the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, who was brutally beaten in Chechnya yesterday, has been moved to a hospital in Moscow.
The Ukraine government accused Russia on Tuesday of planning a “provocation” at the Moscow-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, while Russia claimed that Kyiv was planning to “attack” the facility. Fears over the safety risks for the nuclear plant, Europe’s largest, have been constant throughout Russia’s invasion, but increased in early June after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam, the source of cooling water for its reactors. Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Wednesday that “objects resembling explosives” had been placed on the roof of several power units “perhaps to simulate an attack”. He added: “The world sees – can’t but see – that the only source of danger to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is Russia and no one else.”
Russia sees no basis for renewing the Black Sea grain deal, the Russian foreign ministry said on Tuesday, less than two weeks before the expiration of the agreement, which has allowed grain to be shipped out of Black Sea ports despite the war in Ukraine. The ministry said in a statement Russia was doing everything so that all ships covered by the deal could leave the Black Sea before it expires on 17 July, Reuters reported.
Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on Tuesday that Ukraine launched a drone attack on the Russian capital and its region, temporarily disrupting flight operations at the Vnukovo airport. “At this moment, the attacks have been repelled by air defence forces,” Sobyanin said on Telegram. “All detected drones have been eliminated”. There were no casualties or injured reported.
Vladimir Putin has said that Russia remains “united as never before” in the wake of the failed mutiny by the Wagner mercenary group and claimed the country continued to flourish in the face of heavy western sanctions over his invasion of Ukraine. In an address from the Kremlin to a virtual gathering of leaders from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), a group founded by Russia and China to counter western influence, the Russian president attempted to rebuff any suggestion that he had been weakened by last week’s chaotic but short-lived rebellion led by Yevgeny Prigozhin.
A funeral service has taken place in Kyiv for the celebrated writer Victoria Amelina. A Ukrainian novelist, poet and public intellectual, she died from injuries sustained when a Russian missile attack struck a pizza restaurant in the eastern town of Kramatorsk, killing 12 people in total, including children.
Oleksiy Danilov has described recent days of battle as “fruitful” for Ukraine in terms of destroying the resources of the Russian forces. In a post to social media, the secretary of Ukraine’s national security and defence council described Ukraine as acting “calmly” and “wisely’ in its counteroffensive.
