Ukrainian forces have registered “a definite advance” on the southern flank of the eastern city of Bakhmut, according to Ukraine’s deputy defence minister, Hanna Maliar. In a Telegram post Maliar said there was no change in positions on the northern flank. She did not give any further details but attention in recent days has focused on the village of Klishchiivka, lying on heights to the south of Bakhmut. Earlier Col Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, the commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, said they were “making progress” around the city. Russian forces captured Bakhmut in May but are thought to be struggling to maintain control of it.
A joint investigation by the Russian investigative journalism outfits Meduza and Mediazona released this morning estimates that about 47,000 Russian soldiers and contract fighters have died since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. The figures were calculated based on data from the beginning of the war until 27 May 2023, and the investigation claimed to have determined with 95% probability that the true figure was between 40,000 and 55,000. Russia has not released official figures for those killed in action since September 2022, when it said 5,937 soldiers had died in what Moscow calls its “special military operation”. The numbers were widely seen as implausibly low. Ukraine’s military has claimed to have killed over 230,000 enemy combatants.
Russia is “almost certainly struggling with a crisis of combat medical provision, after suffering an average of around 400 casualties a day for 17 months,” the UK’s Ministry of Defence has said in its latest intelligence update.
Four people died and 11 were injured after Russia’s bombing of a residential area of the frontline town of Orikhiv in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region while distribution of humanitarian aid was taking place, the governor of the region said on Monday. Yuriy Malashko said those killed included three woman and a man, all in their 40s.
Russia’s ministry of defence has published an image of Valery Gerasimov for the first time since the failed Wagner uprising of 24 June. Gerasimov was one of the military leaders that Yevgeney Prigozhin had been railing against for weeks before ordering his mercenaries to march on Moscow.
Joe Biden has said Ukraine is “not ready” for Nato membership, ahead of a two-day summit of the military alliance’s leaders in Vilnius. Speaking to CNN, the US president said Nato needed to “lay out a rational path” for Kyiv to follow in order to join the bloc, but that it would take time before the country met “all the qualifications, from democratisation to a whole range of other issues”.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said he was hoping for “the best possible result” from the summit, following talks with his Polish counterpart, Andrzej Duda. Zelenskiy has said he does not expect Ukraine to actually join Nato until after the war but that he hopes the summit will give a “clear signal” on the intention to bring Ukraine into the alliance.
On Monday Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba posted to social media to say “following intensive talks, Nato allies have reached consensus on removing MAP from Ukraine’s path to membership. I welcome this long-awaited decision that shortens our path to Nato”. The “membership action plan” (MAP) is a process by which the alliance enters negotiations with a prospective member about political, economic, defence and security issues.
Turkey’s foreign ministry said that foreign minister Hakan Fidan and US secretary of state Antony Blinken discussed the expansion of Nato in a phone call ahead of the alliance’s summit in Lithuania. Turkey and Hungary are yet to ratify Sweden’s accession to the alliance.
A substantial announcement on Germany delivering military hardware to Ukraine is expected over the course of this week’s Nato summit, a senior government official said in Berlin on Monday.
Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor of the Belgorod region in Russia, has posted his daily operational update to Telegram. He listed a number of settlements in the region which he claims have seen cross-border shelling from Ukrainian forces. He reported no casualties, although he did detail some damage to power lines.
Denis Pushilin, the Russian-imposed leader of occupied Donetsk, has said that presently the Russian authorities in the region are unable to proceed with demining in the Bakhmut area due to shelling by Ukrainian forces.
Poland has detained another member of a Russian spy network, bringing the total number of people rounded up in an investigation to 15, Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski has said.
Russian air defence systems shot down four missiles on Sunday, Russian officials said, one over the annexed Crimean peninsula and three over Russia’s Rostov and Bryansk regions that border Ukraine. Several buildings were damaged in Rostov and Bryansk but no casualties were reported. No casualties or damage were reported in Crimea.
South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has said next month’s Brics summit, which Vladimir Putin has been invited to attend, will be held in-person despite an arrest warrant on the Russian leader. “The Brics summit is going ahead and we are finalising our discussions on the format,” Ramaphosa told South African journalists on Sunday on the sidelines of a conference by the ruling ANC, adding it would be a “physical” meeting.
With Reuters, Associated Press and Agence France-Presse
