Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,223
Fighting
The Russian-installed governor of the occupied Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine, Leonid Pasechnik, said that Russian troops are now in full control of the entire region.
If confirmed, that would make Luhansk the first Ukrainian region fully occupied by Russia after more than three years of war. Luhansk is one of four regions that Russia now claims as its own.
Russia's state media and war bloggers also said that Russian forces have taken control of the first village in the central Ukrainian region of Dnipropetrovsk.
This came as Moscow-appointed officials said Ukrainian forces attacked the city of Donetsk in the Russian-occupied Donetsk region, killing at least one person, damaging several buildings and setting a market on fire.
Also in Donetsk, Russian forces have occupied one of Ukraine's most valuable lithium deposits near the village of Shevchenko, The Kyiv Independent reported, citing Roman Pohorilyi, the founder of the open-source mapping project Deep State Map.
The Ukrainian Air Force, meanwhile, said it detected 107 Russian Shahed and decoy drones in the country's airspace overnight, a day after the country experienced the biggest aerial attack from Russian forces since 2022.
Russian strikes in Ukraine's northeastern Kharkiv region left two civilians dead and eight wounded, including a 6-year-old child, regional Governor Oleh Syniehubov said.
Outside the immediate region, Bloomberg reported an explosion on an oil tanker near Libya, in the latest unexplained blast on vessels that had previously called at Russian ports.
Politics and diplomacy
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov urged the United States to consider whether new sanctions on Russia would help the Ukraine peace effort after a top Republican senator said he had received US President Donald Trump's blessing to move forward on a bill introducing punitive measures against Moscow.
US envoy Keith Kellogg responded to Peskov's comments, describing them as 'Orwellian'. 'Russia cannot continue to stall for time while it bombs civilian targets in Ukraine,' Kellogg said in a post on X.
German Minister for Foreign Affairs Johann Wadephul, speaking during a visit to the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of making 'pure mockery' of peace talks.
'His apparent readiness to negotiate is only a facade so far,' Wadephul said, adding that Germany was trying to help Ukraine get to a point where it could 'negotiate more strongly'.
The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that Moscow was introducing 'reciprocal measures' restricting access to 15 media outlets from the European Union, in retaliation for the latest round of EU sanctions on Russia.
In North Korea, images on state television showed leader Kim Jong Un draping coffins with the country's national flag in what appeared to be the repatriation of soldiers killed fighting for Russia against Ukraine, according to the Reuters news agency.
Norway said it would deploy F-35 fighter jets to Poland to protect Polish airspace and a key logistical hub for aid to Ukraine, a day after Warsaw scrambled aircraft in response to Russian air attacks on western Ukraine, near the border.
Economy
The International Monetary Fund said it would provide $500m to Ukraine, after completing a routine review of its $15.5bn four-year support programme.
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Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,251
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'Our Genocide' The report delves into Israeli violations against Palestinians, going back to the 1948 foundation of the Israeli state, which 'had a clear objective from the outset: to cement the supremacy of the Jewish group across the entire territory under Israeli control'. As such, the state of Israel exhibits 'settler-colonial patterns, including widespread settlement involving displacement and dispossession, demographic engineering, ethnic cleansing and the imposition of military rule on Palestinians', the report continues. And while it looks back at Israel's efforts to 'uphold Jewish supremacy, relying on a false pretense of the rule of law while, in reality, the rights of the Palestinian subjects are left unprotected', the report notes that this was accelerated after October 7. The 'broad, coordinated onslaught against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip' that the report points to has 'enjoyed support, legitimization, and normalization from the majority of Jewish-Israelis, as well as from the Israeli legal system'. The report also speaks about the intensified efforts since October 2024 to displace Palestinians in Gaza. 'Israel's actions in northern Gaza were described by many experts … as an attempt to carry out ethnic cleansing. In practice, by November 2024, some 100,000 people who had lived in northern Gaza had been displaced from their homes,' the document reads. The report goes beyond Gaza to say that Israel has intensified its violent operations in the occupied West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem since October 7, 'on a scale not seen since Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967'. B'Tselem first used the word 'apartheid' in 2021 to describe the two-tier reality for Israelis and Palestinians in historic Palestine. Genocide in words and actions B'tselem's report follows an op-ed in the New York Times by Holocaust scholar Amos Goldberg, where he described Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide, as well as growing demonstrations by protesters in Israel calling for an end to the war. However, opposition to Israel's war on Gaza is still widely controversial in Israeli society. Only around 16 percent of Jewish Israelis believe peaceful coexistence with Palestinians is possible, according to a June poll by the Pew Research Center. Meanwhile, 64 percent of Jewish Israelis believe Israel should temporarily occupy the Gaza Strip, according to a survey by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA). Critics of stereotypical Israeli views include Israeli political commentator Ori Goldberg, a former university professor and national security consultant, who called these views 'vile' on the social media platform X. I was overcome yesterday. 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Welcomed news, even if late B'Tselem's report runs 79 pages and documents interviews with numerous Palestinians in Gaza who have lived through the last 22 months of attacks. That one of Israel's most prominent human rights organisations described Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide is bound to draw criticism of the group in Israeli society. Many Israeli critics of their own country's actions in Gaza have faced brutal denunciations from their compatriots. That makes B'Tselem using the weight of the word 'genocide' all the more powerful, even if some believe it could have been done sooner. 'I welcome this news even though it comes very late into the genocide,' Ayoub said. In December 2023, South Africa brought a case that Israel was committing genocide against Gaza to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Several other countries, including Brazil, Spain, Turkiye and the Republic of Ireland, have joined South Africa in its ICJ case.
