Every week we wrap up the must-reads from our coverage of the Ukraine war, from news and features to analysis, visual guides and opinion.
Ukraine’s Kakhovka dam destroyed, flooding the frontline
Southern Ukraine’s Kakhovka dam and hydroelectric station were largely destroyed on Tuesday, flooding a swathe of the war’s frontline. Ukraine blamed Russia for the destruction of the dam wall that forced thousands to evacuate.
If Kremlin-installed “governor” Vladimir Saldo was trying to project a sense of calm among the deluged frontline towns and villages of Russian-occupied Kherson region, he was failing miserably, Andrew Roth and Pjotr Sauer wrote. Saldo, dressed in camouflage and helmet and sitting in front of the flooded remains of the town centre of Nova Kakhovka, claimed that the city was “alive”.
But the reality of the catastrophe was playing out around him: people stranded on the roofs of their houses and flats, begging for those with boats to come and save them. Dozens missing and whole towns downriver washed away. Satellite images would later reveal the extent of the disaster, while a Guardian team created a visual guide to the disaster on the hours after it unfolded.
Russia’s UN envoy was accused of floundering in a “mud of lies” after he claimed at an emergency session of the security council that Ukraine destroyed the dam in a “war crime”, Patrick Wintour reported.
At first, even as the waters were rising, Viktor Ivankhnenko hoped the one-storey home he had built on a Russian-occupied island in the Dnipro River would be safe. But as day wore into night, it became clear his optimism was misplaced.
By 3am on Wednesday, Viktor, 66, and his wife, Nadiia, knew it was time to leave. Packing up what possessions they could, they got into a boat and paddled desperately to a neighbour’s two-storey house as the waters enveloped their own.
Rescuers had brought the couple to Kherson by boat on Wednesday lunchtime, delivering them to a makeshift port that before the flooding was a nondescript urban crossroads. On Monday it had been 500 metres from the banks of the river, Dan Sabbagh reported, but then the dam upstream at Nova Kakhovka had burst.
As the country’s agrarian and food ministry warned that the fields of southern Ukraine could “turn into deserts” by next year, Julian Borger wrote that the devastation could take decades to heal.
Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant at risk, report says
The cooling pond at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is in danger of collapse, Julian Borger reports, as a result of the destruction of the Kakhovka dam and the draining of its reservoir, according to a French nuclear safety organisation.
Without the reservoir on the other side to counteract it, the internal pressure of the water in the cooling pool could breach the dyke around it, a report by the Paris-based Institute for Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN) said.
The loss of the pool would not necessarily be catastrophic as other sources of water could be brought in, such as pumping trucks, to prevent a meltdown of the plant’s nuclear fuel, but a loss of the cooling pool would dramatically increase safety concerns at the plant.
The UN’s nuclear watchdog also confirmed that plant can rely on a large cooling pond above the reservoir with several months’ worth of water.
The counteroffensive appears to enter its preliminary stages
The current fog of war in Ukraine is in large part artificially generated: “Plans love silence,” Kyiv observed in a typically well-executed video released on social media on Sunday, showing its soldiers holding fingers to their lips. After months of speculation, and amid perceptible impatience in some foreign capitals, its long-awaited counteroffensive appears at last to be in its preliminary stages, the Guardian wrote in its editorial.
For weeks now the Ukrainian army has been carrying out “shaping” or tactical operations around a vast 600-mile frontline, stretching from the south to the north-east. The goal is to wipe out Russia’s military potential, Luke Harding reported. Ukrainian units have used attack drones to destroy enemy tanks and positions in night-time missions. There have been longer-range strikes against weapons depots and fuel dumps. Kyiv has used British Storm Shadow missiles to target eastern cities such as Luhansk, taken over by Russia in 2014, and the occupied ports of Mariupol and Berdiansk. By Thursday, there was intense fighting south of Zaporizhzhia and Zelenskiy was hailing “results” in Donetsk.
Nato members may send troops to Ukraine, warns former alliance chief
A group of Nato countries may be willing to put troops on the ground in Ukraine if member states including the US do not provide tangible security guarantees to Kyiv at the alliance’s summit in Vilnius, the former Nato secretary general Anders Rasmussen has said.
Rasmussen, who has been acting as official adviser to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, on Ukraine’s place in a future European security architecture, has been touring Europe and Washington to gauge the shifting mood before the critical summit starts on 11 July.
He also warned that even if a group of states did provide Ukraine with security guarantees, others would not allow the issue of Ukraine’s future Nato membership to be kept off the agenda at Vilnius. Patrick Wintour reported this story.
Wagner captures Russian commander
Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner group of mercenaries has captured a Russian commander, Pjotr Sauer reported, as the notorious leader further escalates his feud with the regular army.
In a video posted on Prigozhin’s social media channels, Lt Col Roman Venevitin, the commander of Russia’s 72nd Brigade, tells an interrogator that, while drunk, he had ordered his troops to fire on a Wagner convoy.
In the footage, which resembled clips of prisoner of war soldiers, Venevitin said he acted because of his “personal dislike” for Wagner and then apologised.
Last week, Prigozhin accused the Russian army of trying to blow up his men as they were pulling back from the eastern Ukrainian town of Bakhmut.
Two-year-old girl killed in Russian missile attack on Dnipro
A two-year-old girl was found dead under the rubble of a house near the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro as recriminations continued about the availability of air raid shelters in the capital.
Serhiy Lysak, the governor of the Dnipro region, said another 22 people were injured, including five children, in an attack that destroyed or damaged several buildings.
“Overnight, the body of a girl who had just turned two was pulled from under the rubble of a house,” said the governor. The girl was called Lisa and was with her mother when the missile struck in the yard of the house, he said.
Three boys aged 15, 11 and six were in intensive care after the missile strike, suffering from concussions and multiple fractures. All three had to be operated on to help their recovery, the governor said.
