Here is the situation on Friday, July 5, 2024.
Fighting
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Russian attacks killed two people and wounded 26 in Ukrainian regions stretching from the south to the east and northeast, Ukraine authorities said. A missile strike in the southern Odesa region killed a woman and injured seven people, while a second woman was killed and a man was injured in a strike in Kharkiv region’s village of Ruska Lozova.
- A six-year-old girl has died in hospital after a drone attack on the town of Primorsko-Akhtarsk in Russia’s Krasnodar region, Veniamin Kondratyev, the regional governor, said. Earlier on Friday, he said six people were hospitalised after the attack.
- Nine people, including four children, were wounded in a drone attack and shelling in the town of Novohrodivka in Ukraine’s front-line Donetsk region, according to Governor Vadym Filashkin.
- Dnipropetrovsk Governor Serhiy Lysak said seven people were wounded in the southern town of Nikopol following a series of drone and artillery strikes by Russian forces. An injured woman also succumbed to her injuries sustained on Wednesday in the region’s main city, Dnipro. That attack had killed at least seven people.
- Two civilians in the southern city of Kherson were wounded in a drone strike, according to the city government.
- Ukraine’s army has announced that its forces have retreated from a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Chasiv Yar, a strategically important town in the eastern Donetsk region that has been reduced to rubble under a months-long Russian assault.
Politics and diplomacy
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Russian President Vladimir Putin and visiting Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban began talks on the Ukraine conflict at the Kremlin. At the televised talks, Putin said he wanted to take the opportunity to “discuss the nuances that have developed” over the conflict in Ukraine with Orban, who visited Kyiv earlier this week.
- German Chancellor Olaf Scholz vowed that the European Union’s backing for Ukraine would not weaken despite Orban’s meeting with Putin. Scholz said Orban does not represent the EU on the visit, underlining that the bloc’s “clear message is that Ukraine can count on our solidarity, (Russian President Vladimir) Putin cannot count on our solidarity and support waning”.
- Earlier this week, Orban visited Kyiv and urged Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to consider a ceasefire to accelerate an end to the war with Russia. Hungary currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Union and a visit to Moscow would spark fury in the bloc.
- Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on July 8-9 is set to make his first visit to Russia since the invasion of Ukraine, walking a fine line between maintaining a longstanding Moscow alliance while courting closer Western security ties. He last visited Russia in 2019 and hosted Putin in New Delhi in 2021.
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A Russian military court has placed Colonel Artyom Gorodilov, commander of the country’s 83rd Guards Air Assault Brigade, in pre-trial detention for two months on charges of large-scale fraud, according to state news agency TASS. Gorodilov is the latest in a series of high-ranking Russian military officers and senior defence officials to be arrested on charges of corruption in recent months.
Weapons
- Germany has announced that the latest Patriot air defence system it supplied to Kyiv is now in Ukraine, as it struggles to hold off a blistering Russian strike campaign. Martin Jaeger, German Ambassador to Ukraine, wrote on X, that the “third Patriot air defence system” has arrived, just months after Berlin’s announcement in April.
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Russia’s Ministry of Defence is carrying out drills involving mobile nuclear missile launchers, the Interfax news agency cited the ministry as saying. Yars missile launcher crews from two units are set to move over 100km (62 miles) and practise camouflage and deployment, it said, with more crews joining drills in the future.
- The ministry also said that its forces destroyed 50 Ukrainian drones both in Russian territory and areas of Ukraine it had annexed. It said 14 drones were destroyed over Krasnodar, 26 over Zaporizhzhia, and 10 over Rostov.
