At least three people were killed and 15 injured following a missile attack on Friday on Dnipro in central Ukraine, the country’s fourth-largest city with more than 1 million inhabitants. “The rockets hit an industrial plant and a busy street next to it,” the regional governor, Valentyn Rezynchenko, said on his Facebook page.
The UK said the Kremlin was “fully responsible” for the death of a British captive in east Ukraine as rescue workers in Vinnytsia scoured debris for missing people after devastating Russian rocket attacks. The British foreign secretary, Liz Truss, said: “I am shocked to hear reports of the death of British aid worker Paul Urey while in the custody of a Russian proxy in Ukraine. Russia must bear the full responsibility for this.” Rescue workers were still clearing debris in the wake of strikes in Vinnytsia, central Ukraine, that killed at least 23 people.
A top Ukrainian official has accused Russia of deliberately escalating its deadly attacks on civilian targets. Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s national security council, told the Guardian that monitoring of Russian strikes suggested an increased emphasis in recent weeks on terrorising Ukraine’s civilian population. “That’s not my emotions but what our monitoring is telling us.”
A wounded soldier who returned from Russian captivity has recounted how Russian forces would threaten Ukrainian soldiers with the death penalty if they refused to cooperate. Denys Piskun, an Azov soldier, told Azov Media: “They said that if you don’t testify, if you don’t cooperate, there will be the death penalty. You all have the death penalty on trial as a Nazi terrorist organisation.”
Ukrainian officials have confirmed that the US House of Representatives approved $100m in funding to train Ukrainian pilots to operate American aircraft as part of the National Defence Authorisation Act. The pilots will be trained on F-15 and F-16 jets, according to Andriy Yermak, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s chief of staff.
Ukraine’s military losses peaked in May, the defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, said in a new interview aired on Friday. Speaking to the BBC, Reznikov said: “The biggest peak of our losses was in May,” with up to 100 soldiers being killed a day.
Europe has “shot itself in the lungs” with sanctions aimed at Russia over its war in Ukraine, the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said on Friday. Orbán, a nationalist who has ruled Hungary since 2010 and frequently clashes with Brussels, has been a fierce critic of European Union sanctions on Russian oil. In an address on national radio, Orbán urged EU leaders to change the sanctions policy.
Ukrainian rocket strikes have destroyed more than 30 Russian military logistics centres in recent weeks and significantly reduced Russia’s attacking potential, Ukraine’s defence ministry spokesperson said on Friday. The official, Oleksandr Motuzianyk, emphasised the role played by US Himars (high mobility artillery rocket systems) rocket systems, one of several types of long-range weapon supplied by the west to assist Ukraine in the war.
M270 long-range multiple rocket launch systems have arrived in Ukraine, the Ukrainian defence minister announced on Friday. “They will be good company for Himars on the battlefield.”
