At least six people, including a 10-year-old child, have been killed and more than 50 people injured when Russia struck a high-rise apartment in Kryvyi Rih. Authorities said people were trapped under rubble. Oleksiy Kuleba, the deputy head of Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s office, called for revenge, saying: “Every day, Ukrainian cities are under fire from Russian terrorists. Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro, Kharkiv. This is only for the last few days.” He said targeting civilians was a sign of “the despair and defeat of the Russian Federation at the front”.
Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, said “This is how the week begins in a Ukrainian city that just wants a quiet, normal life. Russia wants to take peace and life away”, and offered condolences to the victims and their families. The city is the home town of both Zelenska and her husband.
On Telegram, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said more than 350 people are working on the rescue mission in Kryvyi Rih after what he said were two Russian ballistic missiles hit the city.
Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza on Monday lost an appeal against his 25-year jail sentence, the RIA state news agency reported. Kara-Murza, who holds Russian and British citizenship, was jailed for 25 years in April for treason and spreading “false information” about Russia’s war in Ukraine, Reuters reports. Britain added six new designations to its Russia sanctions list, an update to the government website showed on Monday, targeting judges and officials involved in the trial of Kara-Murza.
According to Reuters, Ukraine and Croatia have agreed on the possibility of using Croatian ports on the Danube and the Adriatic Sea for the export of Ukrainian grain, Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said after talks with his Croatian counterpart on Monday.
Russian airstrikes destroyed an estimated 180,000 metric tonnes of grain crops in the space of nine days this month, the Ukrainian foreign ministry said on Monday, Reuters reports.
Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, said Russia lost 87 units of equipment last week, including 33 strongholds, 26 armored combat vehicles and 15 tanks. These claims have not been independently verified.
The Kremlin on Monday described a recent drone attack on Moscow as an “act of desperation” by Ukraine after setbacks on the battlefield. AFP reports that Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said it has been “very difficult” for Ukrainian forces on the frontline since it launched its counteroffensive in June. He added: “It is obvious that the counteroffensive is not a success. In an act of desperation, the regime in Kyiv is turning to such terrorist attacks. All possible measures have been taken to defend civil infrastructure [against Ukrainian strikes].”
Ukrainian forces have recaptured nearly 15 sq km (5.8 sq miles) of land from Russian troops in the east and south over the past week during their counteroffensive, a senior defence official said on Monday. Kyiv’s forces have now retaken 204.7 sq km in the south since they launched a major push back against Russian forces early last month, deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar said on Telegram.
The Kremlin said on Monday that Ukraine’s counteroffensive is “not working out as planned” and that Nato resources supplied to Kyiv had been “wasted”, during the course of a two month-long operation that has seen limited gains for Ukraine.
Denis Pushilin, the Russian-imposed acting governor of occupied Donetsk, has claimed that at least two people have been killed and at least six injured after a Ukrainian strike hit a bus in the city which had been capital of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic since 2014, and which Russia claimed to have annexed last year.
Three Ukrainian drones that were shot down over Moscow damaged a high-rise building containing government offices and briefly shut an international airport, according to reports. Moscow mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said nobody was hurt and there was only minor damage to the facade of two office buildings in the Moscow City business district early on Sunday. Russia’s state news agency Tass reported a security guard had been injured. One of the damaged buildings – several kilometres from the Kremlin – was home to three Russian government ministries as well as residential apartments, according to Russian media, in the third such attack on the capital region in a week.
The Kremlin said on Monday that Ukraine’s counteroffensive was “not working out as planned” and that Nato resources supplied to Kyiv had been “wasted”. On a call with reporters, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said separately that Russia would take additional measures to defend against Ukrainian drone strikes.
“War is returning to the territory of Russia,” Zelenskiy warned after the drones were downed over Moscow. The Ukrainian president said that was “an inevitable, natural and absolutely fair process” and that Russia’s symbolic centres and military bases would be targeted.
Suspilne reports that as a result of morning shelling in Kherson, a 60-year-old employee of a utility company was killed, and four more people were injured. The Russian army also shelled Kramatorsk with rockets at night, and an industrial zone was hit. There were no casualties or injuries reorted.
Alexey Kulemzin, the Russian-imposed mayor of the occupied city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, has reported that “facades, balconies, roofing and glazing” have been damaged in Kuibyshevskyi district in the city by overnight shelling.
Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin appears to have said in a voice message published on Monday that his Wagner group was not currently recruiting fighters but was likely to do so in future. Prigozhin said in the voice message that “unfortunately” some of his fighters had moved to other “power structures”, but he said they were looking to return. “As long as we don’t experience a shortage in personnel, we don’t plan to carry out a new recruitment,” Prigozhin said. “However, we will be extremely grateful to you if you keep in touch with us, and as soon as the Motherland needs to create a new group that will be able to protect the interests of our country, we will certainly start recruiting.”
Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said Moscow would be “forced” to use a nuclear weapon if Kyiv’s counteroffensive was a success and its forces “tore off a part of our land”. Medvedev, the deputy chair of Russia’s security council, said that in that situation “there would simply be no other option”.
Saudi Arabia will host a Ukrainian-organised peace summit in early August seeking a way to start negotiations over the war, the Associated Press has reported, citing Saudi officials. One, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Russia was not invited to the talks in Jeddah. The head of Ukraine’s presidential office, Andriy Yermak, later confirmed the talks would be held in Saudi Arabia. Riyadh has not acknowledged the summit nor responded to a request for comment. The Kremlin said on Monday it needed to find out the purpose of upcoming talks.
