Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,219
Here is how things stand on Friday, June 27:
Fighting
Russian air strikes killed one person and wounded two others in Ukraine's southern region of Kherson, regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on Telegram.
Russian troops have taken control of the village of Shevchenko in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk region, which is close to a lithium deposit, after fierce resistance from Ukrainian forces, a Russian-backed official in the occupied region said.
Russian troops also took control of the settlement of Novoserhiivka also in Donetsk, according to the Russian Ministry of Defence.
Ukraine's forces stopped Russian advances in the border area of Ukraine's northern region of Sumy this week, the country's top general, Oleksandr Syrskii, said in a statement.
Syrskii has also ordered defensive lines to be built more quickly in the Sumy region, as Russian forces gain ground towards the industrial Dnipropetrovsk region.
Military
North Korea will send more troops to Russia to assist in its war against Ukraine, possibly as early as July, a South Korean lawmaker said, citing information from Seoul's spy agency.
Politics and diplomacy
Ukraine and Russia exchanged a new group of captured soldiers, the latest in a series of prisoner swaps agreed at peace talks in Istanbul earlier this month. Neither side said how many prisoners were released, but they had pledged to swap at least 1,000 soldiers each during their direct meeting in Istanbul on June 2.
Russia said there was no progress yet towards setting a date for the next round of peace talks with Ukraine, Interfax news agency reported. Another state news agency, TASS, quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying Russia was in favour of continued United States efforts to mediate talks.
The European Union's 27 leaders have agreed to extend sanctions on Russia for another six months, resolving fears that Kremlin-friendly Hungary would let the measures lapse, officials said. The sanctions include the continued freezing of more than $234bn in Russian central bank assets until at least early 2026.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has urged the European Council to send 'a clear political message' that Brussels backs Kyiv in its effort to join the EU.
Earlier, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said that a state-organised consultation gave him a 'strong mandate' to oppose neighbouring Ukraine's EU accession at the EU summit in Brussels.
The international chemical weapons watchdog, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), said that it had found a banned tear gas in seven samples submitted by Ukraine, which has accused Russia of using the riot control agent on the front line. It was the third time the OPCW confirmed the use of CS gas in areas where fighting is taking place in Ukraine.
Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said a new arms race could lead to the fall of Russian President Vladimir Putin's 'regime', just like it toppled the Soviet Union.
Press freedom
A Russian court said it had found a photographer, Grigory Skvortsov, guilty of treason and jailed him for 16 years after he allegedly admitted passing detailed information about once-secret Soviet-era bunkers to a US journalist.
Moscow will summon the German ambassador soon to inform him of retaliatory measures in response to what it sees as the harassment of Russian journalists based in Germany, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
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Al Jazeera
14 hours ago
- Al Jazeera
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,220
Here is how things stand on Saturday, June 28: Fighting Ukraine's military has said it struck four Russian Su-34 warplanes at the Marinovka base outside Russia's city of Volgograd, some 900km (550 miles) from the Ukrainian border. A Russian missile attack has killed at least five people and wounded more than 20 in Samar in Ukraine's southeast, in the second strike on the industrial city in three days. Russian troops have captured the village of Nova Kruhlyakivka in Ukraine's eastern Kharkiv region, Russia's state news agency TASS reported. A Russian attack has damaged an 'important power facility' in Ukraine's southern Kherson region, causing power cuts in some settlements in the region, regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said. A Ukrainian drone attack on Russia's Kursk region injured a war correspondent from Chinese news outlet Phoenix TV, Russian authorities said, as they urged the United Nations to respond to the incident. Ukraine's air force said it downed 359 out of 363 drones and six of eight missiles launched by Russia in an overnight attack. Russia's drone production jumped by 16.9 percent in May compared with the previous month, data from a think tank close to the government showed, after President Vladimir Putin called for output to be stepped up. Ceasefire deal United States President Donald Trump said he thinks something will happen in Russia's war in Ukraine that would get it 'settled', citing his recent call with Putin but offering no other details. Putin said relations between Russia and the US were beginning to stabilise, attributing the improvement to efforts by President Trump. Putin reiterated that he had 'great respect' for the US leader and was willing to meet him. Putin also said Moscow was ready to hold a new round of peace negotiations with Ukraine, potentially in Istanbul, although the time and venue have yet to be agreed. NATO Lithuania has notified the UN that it is leaving the treaty banning antipersonnel landmines. It joins Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Poland – all NATO and European Union members bordering Russia – in withdrawing from the treaty, citing the increased military danger from their Russian neighbour. The Kremlin said Estonia's stated readiness to host NATO allies' US-made F-35A stealth jets, capable of carrying nuclear weapons, posed a direct threat to Moscow. Putin said Russia was looking to cut its military expenditure from next year, contrasting that with NATO's plan to raise its collective spending goal to 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in the next 10 years. Sanctions Senator Ron Wyden, the top Senate Finance Committee Democrat, pressed US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to commit to enforcing Ukraine-related sanctions against Russia and to clarify comments about Russia rejoining an international bank payments network. Wyden also sought answers on how the US-Ukraine critical minerals deal and investment agreement would help improve Ukraine's post-war security and not benefit any entity or country that aided Russia's war effort. Ukraine plans to ask the EU to sanction Bangladeshi entities it says are importing wheat taken from Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia, after its warnings to Dhaka failed to stop the trade, a top Ukrainian diplomat in South Asia said.
Al Jazeera
21 hours ago
- Al Jazeera
Russia kills 5 in Ukraine's Samar, as Putin seems ready for new peace talks
Russian forces have continued to hammer Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk region, launching a deadly attack on the industrial city of Samar for the second time in three days. Friday's missile attack killed five people and injured 23 others in southeastern Samar – located outside the region's main city, Dnipro – said regional governor Sergiy Lysak in a post on Telegram. At least four of the wounded were in severe condition and were taken to hospital, he added. The attack followed missile strikes earlier this week on both Dnipro and Samar, which killed at least 23, as Russian forces attempted to gain a foothold in Dnipropetrovsk for the first time in over three years of war. Officials gave no immediate details about the damage inflicted on Samar, where an attack on an unidentified infrastructure facility on Tuesday killed two people. Moscow earlier this week claimed to have captured two more villages near the border of the Dnipropetrovsk region. Separately, authorities in Ukraine's northern region of Kharkiv said Russian attacks killed one person and wounded three others. Hundreds of kilometres to the south, in the Kherson region, authorities urged residents on Friday to prepare for extended periods without power after a Russian attack hit a key energy facility. Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on Telegram that 'Russians decided to plunge the region into darkness'. The Ukrainian air force said Russia had launched 363 long-range drones and eight missiles overnight into Friday, claiming that air defences stopped all but four of the drones and downed six cruise missiles. Russia's Defence Ministry, meanwhile, said 39 Ukrainian drones were downed in several regions overnight, including 19 over the Rostov region and 13 over the Volgograd region. 'Find a path' in peace talks The continued attacks on Dnipropetrovsk came as President Vladimir Putin said that he intended to scale back military expenditure and also indicated he was ready for a new round of peace negotiations with Ukraine. The Russian president said his country was ready to reduce the military budget in the long term, owing to budgetary pressures and the increased defence spending having fuelled inflation. Speaking to reporters in Minsk, Belarus, on Friday, he alluded to a new round of peace negotiations with Ukraine, potentially in Istanbul, although the time and venue had yet to be agreed. He acknowledged that the peace proposals from Russia and Ukraine 'are two absolutely contradictory memorandums', but added, 'That's why negotiations are being organised and conducted, in order to find a path to bringing them closer together.' Putin added that the two sides' negotiators were in constant contact and that Russia was ready to return the bodies of 3,000 more Ukrainian soldiers. He also said relations between Russia and the United States were beginning to stabilise, attributing the improvement to efforts by US President Donald Trump. 'In general, thanks to President Trump, relations between Russia and the United States are beginning to level out in some ways,' said Putin. Trump on Friday suggested progress may be on the horizon regarding Russia's war in Ukraine. 'We're working on that one,' Trump told reporters at the White House. 'President Putin called up and he said, I'd love to help you with Iran. I said, do me a favour: I'll handle Iran. Help me with Russia. We got to get that one settled. And I think something's going to happen there.'
Al Jazeera
a day ago
- Al Jazeera
Putin confirms he wants all of Ukraine, as Europe steps up military aid
Ukraine's European allies pledged increased levels of military aid to Ukraine this year, making up for a United States aid freeze, as Russian President Vladimir Putin reaffirmed his ambition to absorb all of Ukraine into the Russian Federation. 'At this moment, the Europeans and the Canadians have pledged, for this year, $35bn in military support to Ukraine,' said NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte ahead of the alliance's annual summit, which took place in The Hague on Tuesday and Wednesday, June 24-25. 'Last year, it was just over $50bn for the full year. Now, before we reach half year, it is already at $35bn. And there are even others saying it's already close to $40bn,' he added. The increase in European aid partly made up for the absence of any military aid offers so far from the Trump administration. In April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy offered to buy the US Patriot air defence systems Ukraine needs to fend off daily missile and drone attacks. The Trump administration made its first sale of weapons to Ukraine the following month, but only of F-16 aircraft parts. At The Hague this week, Zelenskyy said he discussed those Patriot systems with Trump. At a news conference on Wednesday, Trump said: 'We're going to see if we can make some available,' referring to interceptors for existing Patriot systems in Ukraine. 'They're very hard to get. We need them too, and we've been supplying them to Israel,' he said. Russia has repeatedly made a ceasefire conditional on Ukraine's allies stopping the flow of weapons to it. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov repeated that condition on Saturday. Days earlier, Vladimir Putin revealed that his ambition to annex all of Ukraine had not abated. 'I have said many times that the Russian and Ukrainian people are one nation, in fact. In this sense, all of Ukraine is ours,' he declared at a media conference to mark the opening of the Saint Petersburg Economic Forum on Friday, June 20. 'But you know we have an old parable, an old rule: wherever a Russian soldier steps, it is ours.' 'Wherever a Russian soldier steps, he brings only death, destruction, and devastation,' Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said the next day. In a post on the Telegram messaging platform on June 21, Zelenskyy wrote that Putin had 'spoken completely openly'. 'Yes, he wants all of Ukraine,' he said. 'He is also speaking about Belarus, the Baltic states, Moldova, the Caucasus, countries like Kazakhstan.' German army planners agreed about Putin's expansionism, deeming Russia an 'existential threat' in a new strategy paper 18 months in the making, leaked to Der Spiegel news magazine last week. Moscow was preparing its military leadership and defence industries 'specifically to meet the requirements for a large-scale conflict against NATO by the end of this decade', the paper said. 'We in Germany ignored the warnings of our Baltic neighbours about Russia for too long. We have recognised this mistake,' said German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on Tuesday, an about-turn from his two predecessors' refusal to spend more on defence. 'There is no going back from this realisation. We cannot expect the world around us to return to calmer times in the near future,' he added. Germany, along with other European NATO allies, agreed on Wednesday to raise defence spending to 5 percent of gross domestic product by 2035. It was a sign of the increasingly common threat perception from Russia, but also a big win for Trump, who had demanded that level of spending shortly after winning re-election as US president last year. Of that, 1.5 percent is for military-related spending like dual-purpose infrastructure, emergency healthcare, cybersecurity and civic resilience. Even Trump, who has previously expressed admiration for Putin, seemed to be souring on him. 'I consider him a person that's, I think, been misguided,' he said after a moment's thought at his NATO news conference. 'I'm very surprised actually. I thought we would have had that settled easy,' referring to the conflict in Ukraine. 'Vladimir Putin really has to end that war,' he said. Putin continued his ground war during the week of the NATO summit, launching approximately 200 assaults each day, according to Ukraine's General Staff – a high average. Ukraine, itself, was fighting 695,000 Russian troops on its territory, said Zelenskyy on Saturday, with another 52,000 attempting to create a new front in Sumy, northeast Ukraine. 'This week they advanced 200 metres towards Sumy, and we pushed them back 200–400 metres,' he said, a battle description typical of the stagnation Russian troops face along the thousand-kilometre front. Terror from the air Russia continued its campaign of demoralisation among Ukrainian civilians, sending drones and missiles into Ukraine's cities. Russian drones and missiles killed 30 civilians and injured 172 in Kyiv on June 19. 'This morning I was at the scene of a Russian missile hitting a house in Kyiv,' said Zelenskyy. 'An ordinary apartment building. The missile went through all the floors to the basement. Twenty-three people were killed by just one Russian strike.' 'There was no military sense in this strike, it added absolutely nothing to Russia militarily,' he said. Overnight, Russia attacked Odesa, Kharkiv and their suburbs with more than 20 strike drones. At least 10 of the drones struck Odesa. A four-storey building engulfed in flames partly collapsed on top of rescue workers, injuring three firefighters. A drone attack on Kyiv killed at least seven people on Monday this week. 'There were 352 drones in total, and 16 missiles,' said Zelenskyy, including 'ballistics from North Korea'. A Russian drone strike on the Dnipropetrovsk region on Tuesday killed 20 people and injured nearly 300, according to the regional military administration. Ukraine focused on drone production Ukraine, too, is focused on long-range weapons production. Five of its drones attacked the Shipunov Instrument Design Bureau in Tula on June 18 and 20. Shipunov is a key developer of high-precision weapons for the Russian armed forces, said Ukraine, and the strikes damaged the plant's warehouses and administration building, causing it to halt production. 'Thousands of drones have been launched toward Moscow in recent months,' revealed Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin last week, adding that air defences had shot almost all of them down. But Ukraine is constantly improving designs and increasing production. On Monday, the United Kingdom announced that Ukraine would be providing its drone manufacturers with 'technology datasets from Ukraine's front line' to improve the design of British-made drones that would be shipped to Ukraine. 'Ukraine is the world leader in drone design and execution, with drone technology evolving, on average, every six weeks,' the announcement from Downing Street said. On the same day, Norway said it would invert that relationship, to produce surface drones in Ukraine using Norwegian technology. Zelenskyy said this Build with Ukraine programme, in which Ukraine and its allies share financing, technology and production capacity, would ultimately work for missile production in Ukraine as well. His goal is ambitious. 'We want 0.25 percent of the GDP of a particular partner state to be allocated for our defence industry for domestic production next year,' he said. Among Ukraine's projects is a domestically produced ballistic missile, the Sapsan, which can carry a 480kg warhead for a distance of 500km – enough to reach halfway to Moscow from Ukraine's front line. Asked whether the Sapsan could reach Moscow, Zelenskyy's office director, Andriy Yermak, told the UK's Times newspaper: 'Things are moving very well. I think we will be able to surprise our enemies on many occasions.' Trouble with club membership Ukraine's ambition to join NATO and the European Union, leaving Russian orbit, is what triggered this war, and Russia has said that giving up both those clubs is a condition of peace. NATO first invited Ukraine to its 2008 Summit in Bucharest. But in February, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said NATO membership for Ukraine was not a 'realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement', and a 'final' ceasefire offer from the White House on April 17 included a ban on NATO membership for Ukraine. Despite this, on Wednesday, Rutte told Reuters: 'The whole of NATO, including the United States, is totally committed to keep Ukraine in the fight.' On June 9, Rutte had told a discussion at the Chatham House think tank in London that a political commitment to Ukraine's future membership of NATO remained unchanged, even if it was not explicitly mentioned in the final communique of the NATO summit. 'The irreversible path of Ukraine into NATO is there, and it is my assumption that it is still there after the summit,' Rutte said. If that gave Ukrainians renewed hope, this was perhaps dashed by the European Union's inability last week to open new chapters in its own membership negotiations. That was because Slovakia decided to veto the move to do so in the European Council, the EU's governing body. Slovakia also blocked an 18th sanctions package the EU was set to approve this week, because it would completely cut the EU off from Russian oil and gas imports. Slovakia and Hungary have argued they need Russian energy because they are landlocked. Their leaders, Robert Fico and Viktor Orban, have been the only EU leaders to visit Moscow during the war in Ukraine. Zelenskyy has openly accused Fico of benefiting personally from energy imports from Russia. In a week of disruptive politics from Bratislava, Slovakia also intimated it could leave NATO. 'In these nonsensical times of arms buildup, when arms companies are rubbing their hands … neutrality would benefit Slovakia very much,' Fico told a media conference shown online on June 17. He pointed out that this would require parliamentary approval. Three days later, the independent Slovak newspaper Dennik N published an interview with Austria's former defence minister, Werner Fasslabend, in which he said Slovakia's departure from NATO might trigger Austria's entry into the alliance. 'If Slovakia were to withdraw from NATO, it would worsen the security situation for Austria as well. It would certainly spark a major debate about Austria's NATO membership and possible NATO accession,' Fasslabend said.
