A focus on the slow but steady Ukraine Offensive gains below….
Ukrainian forces have retaken a small village in the south of the country, a local Russian official and military bloggers said on Sunday, the first report of a territorial gain in the Zaporizhzhia region since the start of a major counteroffensive earlier this month.
Vladimir Rogov, a Kremlin-appointed regional official, said on the Telegram messaging app that Ukrainian troops had taken the village of Piatykhatky “under operational control,” and were entrenching themselves there. Russian forces, he added, were using artillery fire in an attempt to wrest it back.
There was no independent confirmation of those claims. The Ukrainian military’s nightly General Staff update said Russian forces were “on the defensive” in the region, but made no mention of the village.
Piatykhatky is one of many villages along the southern frontline and its recapture, if confirmed, is unlikely to represent a major military breakthrough for Ukraine. Still, it would be the first village retaken in recent days, and add to the seven villages that Ukrainian officials said they had recaptured further east in the Donetsk region as part of the counteroffensive that began about a week and a half ago….
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Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
- Ukraine has claimed advances covering a little more than 40 square miles of territory in its counteroffensive. Russia occupies more than 800 times that amount, roughly 33,000 square miles, about half of which was seized before the February 2022 invasion.
- During his visit to Beijing, Blinken will reiterate the U.S. expectation that China not provide lethal aid to Russia, officials said Sunday, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic planning. Beijing secretly approved such aid to Moscow earlier this year and planned to disguise military equipment as civilian items, according to a U.S. intercept of Russian intelligence that was revealed in leaked secret documents.
- St. Petersburg will host a second Russia-Africa summit, the Kremlin said Sunday. A Telegram post from the Foreign Ministry did not say when the summit would be held, but it would follow Saturday’s meeting between African leaders and Russian President Vladimir Putin. He rebuffed their proposed measures for peace in Ukraine, according to Reuters. Kyiv wants Russia to withdraw all troops from all occupied territories, while Moscow wants Ukraine to accept Russia’s illegal claim to some Ukrainian territories.
- Russia “has so far declined” U.N. requests to access the areas under its military control that have been impacted by the Kakhovka Dam destruction, Denise Brown, a senior U.N. official, said Sunday. “Aid cannot be denied to people who need it,” Brown said in a statement. “The U.N. will continue to do all it can to reach all people – including those suffering as a result of the recent dam destruction – who urgently need life-saving assistance, no matter where they are.”
- President Volodymyr Zelensky paid tribute to Ukrainian fathers fighting on the front line to mark Father’s Day. “Thank you to every Ukrainian father, every Ukrainian family for our strong and brave warriors who have defended Ukraine’s independence,” he tweeted Sunday.
- Ukrainians struck at least two Russian ammunition caches this weekend, Serhiy Bratchuk, a spokesman for the Odessa military administration, said Sunday via Telegram. The attack was near the Kherson-region village of Rykove, which has been under Russian occupation since March 2022. The Washington Post could not confirm the veracity of Bratchuk’s report on destroyed Russian ammunition, supplies of which have led to infighting between the Kremlin and the Wagner mercenary group it supports.
- The death toll from the explosion at the Kakhovka dam and the floods it unleashed has risen to 16, Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said. More than 3,500 people, including hundreds of children, have been evacuated from the flooded regions, it said. About 1,300 homes remain underwater, most of them in the Kherson area, it added.
- About 25,000 kilometers (15,500 miles) of road in Ukraine needs to be rebuilt after heavy fighting in the war, Ukrainian lawmaker Lesia Vasylenko said in an interview Sunday with Sky News. Russian shelling continues to cause “massive destruction to the critical infrastructure needed for the country to run,” she said.
Russia aims to defeat counteroffensive with mines, artillery and aviation: The initial days of Ukraine’s counteroffensive may have yielded minor gains, but Russia has used the past seven months, Mary Ilyushina reports, to shore up its reserves and ammunition and gather more drones. Its forces have fortified the 900-mile front line, stretching from Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine’s southeast to Russia’s Belgorod region, just over the border…..
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- The death toll from flooding caused by the destruction of the dam has risen to 16 in Ukraine with 31 still missing and 29 in territories controlled by Russia, according to briefings by Kyiv and Moscow. Flood water poured across a huge area of southern Ukraine and Russian-occupied areas when the dam was breached on 6 June.
- Ukraine has recaptured the village of Piatykhatky, in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, reports suggest. It would be the second gain in the area since Kyiv launched its counteroffensive earlier this month. A Russian-installed official said Ukrainian forces had taken the settlement and were entrenching themselves there while coming under fire from Russian artillery, Reuters reported. If confirmed, this is Ukraine’s first village gain for nearly a week, and marks an apparent escalation of the offensive on the most direct route to Crimea.
- Russia’s defence ministry claimed in its daily update its forces had repelled a series of Ukrainian attacks across three sections of the 1000-km-long frontline and made no mention of Piatykhatky, Reuters reports. The battlefield reports could not be independently verified.
- President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has praised Ukrainian forces for their “very effective” repelling of enemy assaults near Avdiivka, one of the focal points of fighting in the east, in his nightly video address. The head of the military administration in Avdiivka, a mining town shattered by months of fighting, told national television that Ukrainian forces had advanced about one km (two-thirds of a mile) around the town over the past two weeks.
- The EU is speeding up arms deliveries to Ukraine to support the counteroffensive against Russian forces, the EU industry chief Thierry Breton told the French daily Le Parisien. He said the EU would be stepping up its efforts, pledging that 1m high-caliber weapons must be provided within the next year.
- The UK Ministry of Defence said heavy fighting continues to be focused in Zaporizhzhia oblast, western Donetsk oblast and around Bakhmut. It says both sides are taking high casualties, with Russian losses likely to be the highest since the peak of the battle for Bakhmut in March. It also noted that Russian defence operations had been “relatively effective in the south”.
- Ukrainian forces have destroyed an ammunition depot near the Russian-occupied port city of Henichesk, in the southern region of Kherson, a spokesperson for the Odesa military administration said on Sunday….