Sloviansk mayor urges residents to flee city
The mayor of Sloviansk has called on its remaining residents to evacuate as the Russian invaders stepped up their shelling of the frontline Ukrainian city following the capture of Lysychansk on Sunday, Dan Sabbagh and Lorenzo Tondo report.
Vadim Lyakh said 40 houses had been shelled on Monday, a day after six people were killed and 20 injured in missile attacks aimed at one of the main population centres in the Donbas still outside Russian control.
“It’s important to evacuate as many people as possible,” Lyakh said in an interview with Reuters, noting that 144 people had been evacuated on Tuesday, including 20 children, from a city now deemed at risk from Russian bombardment.
Russia had concentrated its forces to capture the cities of Lysychansk and Sievierodonetsk between May and July, the last two cities in Luhansk province it did not control, through an unrelenting and often untargeted artillery barrage.
Ukraine said on Monday it had retreated from Lysychansk, prompting speculation that Russia would now focus on Sloviansk and Kramatorsk to the south, the two main cities in Donetsk held by Kyiv. The provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk make up Ukraine’s industrial Donbas region.
Sloviansk had a population of 107,000 and Kramatorsk 210,000 before the war. Despite the threat of a Russian attack, thousands had remained, reluctant to abandon their homes despite being just a few miles from the frontlines.
It is unclear if Moscow will immediately attempt to seize Sloviansk. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said on Monday that Russian troops who fought in Luhansk needed to “take some rest and beef up their combat capability”.
Key events:
Britain has added two Russian individuals to its sanctions list – Denis Gafner and Valeriya Kalabayeva.
The sanctions list has been updated to add Gafner and Kalabayeva, both of whom the UK government said were involved in spreading disinformation and promoting Russian actions in Ukraine.
The UN has documented 270 cases of “arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance” of civilians in parts of Ukraine held by Russian and Russian-backed forces, according to the UN’s human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet.
The findings were based on information gained from field visits and interviews conducted with more than 500 victims and witnesses of human rights violations, as well as other sources of data, Bachelet told the UN’s human rights council in an update on the situation in Ukraine.
In a speech at the same session, Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister, Emine Dzhaparova accused Russia of kidnappings on a “massive” scale.
Russia has denied deliberately attacking civilians since the start of the war.
At least two people killed multiple Russian strikes on Sloviansk, say officials
At least two people were killed and seven injured after Russian forces struck a market and a residential area in the eastern Ukrainian city of Sloviansk, local authorities said.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of the Donetsk region, wrote on Telegram:
Once again the Russians are intentionally targeting places where civilians assemble. This is terrorism pure and simple.
Earlier, police said an attack on a market in Sloviansk had left one woman dead and three people wounded.
Russian-backed separatists have seized two foreign-flagged ships in the Russian-occupied port city of Mariupol and claimed they are “state property”, Reuters reports.
The self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), a pro-Russia quasi-state, informed two shipping companies that their vessels were the subject of “forcible appropriation of movable property with forced conversion into state property”, without any compensation to the owners.
The owner of the Liberia-flagged Smarta bulk vessel, one of the two vessels taken, said it was informed of the seizure by email on 30 June, calling it unlawful and “against all norms of international law”.
It said the ship was hit by shelling on 20 March and that its 19-member crew had been forcibly taken by the Russian military to Donetsk and released a month later.
The seizure of Smarta is “in breach of fundamental human rights in so far as property rights are concerned” and a “serious threat to shipping and to maritime safety”, the company said in a statement.
The other vessel seized was the Panama-flagged Blue Star I, the news agency reports.
A spokesperson with the UN’s shipping agency (IMO) said it was “aware of at least one ship departing from Mariupol, however little else has changed”. More than 80 foreign-flagged ships remain stuck in Ukrainian ports, IMO data showed.
Lorenzo Tondo
It is remote, inhospitable, windswept and largely uninhabited, but it has been fought over for centuries. Legend has it that the rocky outcrop in the Black Sea was created by the sea god Poseidon as a home for the greatest of all Greek warriors: Achilles. And just like the demigod, the small, cross-shaped island has seen its share of wars.
Today, the tiny piece of land is known as Snake Island (Zmiinyi Island), and on Monday Ukrainian forces raised the country’s flag there once again after seizing the island back from Russian occupiers, driven away after months of heavy bombardment.
The fight for Snake Island has strategic value, but most important it is of national significance for all Ukrainians, especially in their country’s darkest hour, with their back to the wall in Donbas. However, in the tiny fishing village of Vylkove, on the Ukrainian side of the Danube River and the closest inhabited area to the Island, the battle to regain control over this outcrop has upended the lives of inhabitants.
The intense fighting on the island between Russian and Ukrainian forces, which began on the first day of the war, has shaken the homes of villagers, in some cases opening cracks in their walls. In Vylkove, 31 miles from Snake Island, shock waves from blasts on the open sea, with nothing to absorb them, have reached the coastline.
Yuri Suslov, 43, has been fishing the waters of the Black Sea since he was a boy. “This is a very quiet town, so when they start bombing Snake Island it was very loud around here,” he said.
Yuri knows Vylkove’s channels like the back of his hand. On his boat, he navigates the narrow waterways that in the summer months resemble those of Vietnam or Cambodia. Reeds and pile dwellings line the edge of the river as children play in the water. Every family in Vylkove has a boat, the city’s principal means of transportation.
Today, Vylkove’s waterways that flow to the mouth of the Danube, giving access to the Black Sea in the direction of Snake Island, are blocked by military checkpoints, with the coast patrolled day and night.
“It’s a scary situation, but I don’t think the Russians are going to attack us,” said Yuri. “You know why? Because we are too close to Romania, and if they accidentally hit Romania, it will be Nato war.’’
The UN’s food agency said it had received $17m (£14m) from Japan to address grain storage problems in Ukraine and increase its exports.
The United Nations’ food and agriculture organisation (FAO) said the funds would help Ukraine store produce from the July-August harvest in plastic sleeves and modular storage containers.
Ukraine’s farmers are “feeding themselves and millions more people around the world”, the head of the FAO’s emergencies and resilience office, Rein Paulsen, said. He added:
Ensuring they can continue production, safely store and access alternative markets is vital to strengthen food security within Ukraine and ensure other import-dependent countries have sufficient supply of grain at a manageable cost.
Ukraine, the world’s fourth-largest grains exporter, is trying to export its crop via road, river and rail since its Black Sea ports stopped operating after Russian troops invaded the country.
Today so far…
It’s 6pm in Kyiv. Here’s where we stand:
- Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has declared victory in the eastern Ukrainian region of Luhansk. On Monday, Russia’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, told Putin that “the operation” in Luhansk was complete. Putin said the military units “that took part in active hostilities and achieved success, victory” in Luhansk “should rest, increase their combat capabilities”.
- Ukrainian forces have taken up new defensive lines in Donetsk, where they still control major cities, and plan to launch counter-offensives in the south of the country. The Luhansk governor, Serhiy Haidai, said the weeks-long battle for Lysychansk had drawn in Russian troops that could have been fighting on other fronts, and had given Ukraine’s forces time to build fortifications in the Donetsk region to make it “harder for the Russians there”.
- Ukrainian forces are set to raise the country’s flag on Snake Island, a strategic and symbolic outpost in the Black Sea that Russian troops retreated from last week after months of heavy bombardment. Ukraine has considered control of the island as a critical step in loosening Moscow’s blockade on its southern ports.
- Ukrainian forces will be able to fall back to a more readily defendable, straightened front line following Russia’s capture of Lysychansk and control of Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region, according to British intelligence. Russia’s “relatively rapid capture” of Lysychansk has allowed its forces to extend its control across virtually all of the territory of Luhansk, according to the UK Ministry of Defence.
- Only 3% of Mariupol residents have access to water, according to the Russian-occupied southern Ukrainian city’s mayoral adviser, Petro Andriushchenko. There are no doctors left in the city, he said, leaving more than 100,000 people without healthcare and medication.
- Russia is planning to launch a railway link between Rostov region and the areas of Donetsk and Luhansk it occupies in eastern, Russian state media reported. Building transport links has also been a priority for the Russian occupiers between Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, and the areas of Kherson which it occupies.
- The 30 Nato member countries have signed accession protocols for Finland and Sweden, sending the membership bids of the two Nordic countries to allied parliaments for approval. Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, urged allies to swiftly ratify and assured the two countries of the alliance’s support in the meantime.
Hello, it’s Léonie Chao-Fong still with you with all the latest developments from the war in Ukraine. I’m on Twitter or you can email me.
Patrick Wintour
Ukrainian plans to seize as much as $500bn (£418bn) in frozen Russian assets to fund the country’s recovery have met firm resistance from Switzerland, the hosts of an international two-day Ukraine recovery conference.
The Swiss president, Ignazio Cassis, pushed back on the plan, saying protection of property rights was fundamental in a liberal democracy. He underlined at a closing press conference the serious qualms of some leaders that proposals to confiscate Russian assets will set a dangerous precedent and needed specific legal justification.
“The right of ownership, the right of property is a fundamental right, a human right,” he said in Lugano, adding that such rights could be violated, as they had during the pandemic, but only so long as there was a legal basis.
He added: “You have to ensure the citizens are protected against the power of the state. This is what we call liberal democracies.”
Switzerland is one of many countries with tight banking secrecy laws that is not enthusiastic about seizing private property for political purposes.
The idea has won the endorsement, in principle, of the UK foreign secretary, Liz Truss.
Russia’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, has claimed some of the weapons the west is sending to Ukraine are ending up on the black market.
Shoigu said Ukraine had received more than 28,000 tonnes of military cargo so far, and some of the weapons were appearing in the Middle East. He did not provide any details to back up his claim.
Speaking in televised remarks, Shoigu said:
According to information at our disposal, some of the foreign weapons supplied by the west to Ukraine are spreading across the Middle Eastern region and are also ending up on the black market.
Sloviansk mayor urges residents to flee city
The mayor of Sloviansk has called on its remaining residents to evacuate as the Russian invaders stepped up their shelling of the frontline Ukrainian city following the capture of Lysychansk on Sunday, Dan Sabbagh and Lorenzo Tondo report.
Vadim Lyakh said 40 houses had been shelled on Monday, a day after six people were killed and 20 injured in missile attacks aimed at one of the main population centres in the Donbas still outside Russian control.
“It’s important to evacuate as many people as possible,” Lyakh said in an interview with Reuters, noting that 144 people had been evacuated on Tuesday, including 20 children, from a city now deemed at risk from Russian bombardment.
Russia had concentrated its forces to capture the cities of Lysychansk and Sievierodonetsk between May and July, the last two cities in Luhansk province it did not control, through an unrelenting and often untargeted artillery barrage.
Ukraine said on Monday it had retreated from Lysychansk, prompting speculation that Russia would now focus on Sloviansk and Kramatorsk to the south, the two main cities in Donetsk held by Kyiv. The provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk make up Ukraine’s industrial Donbas region.
Sloviansk had a population of 107,000 and Kramatorsk 210,000 before the war. Despite the threat of a Russian attack, thousands had remained, reluctant to abandon their homes despite being just a few miles from the frontlines.
It is unclear if Moscow will immediately attempt to seize Sloviansk. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said on Monday that Russian troops who fought in Luhansk needed to “take some rest and beef up their combat capability”.
Here are some of the latest images to be sent to us from Ukraine over the newswires.
