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.
