The military situation:
There was another heavy rocket attack on Monday night. Six people were injured in the Odessa region in southern Ukraine. The missile was fired by a Russian Tu-22 strategic bomber, the Ukrainian Defense Command South said on Monday.
After Russian troops captured the city of Sievjerodonetsk in eastern Ukraine, fighting for the city of Lysychansk continued. The enemy, with the support of artillery, is increasingly trying to block the strategically important city from the south, the Ukrainian general staff said on Sunday evening. Civil and military infrastructure were also hit. This could not be independently verified. According to Ukrainian information, there was also fighting on Snake Island in the Black Sea, which was conquered by Russia. Details were not initially available.
Another gas production platform in the Black Sea has been attacked. This was announced by representatives of the Crimean peninsula, which was incorporated by Russia, on Sunday evening, as reported by the Russian state agency TASS. They blamed Ukraine for the attack. That couldn’t be checked. There were no injuries, it said. It was unclear whether a fire broke out. Three oil rigs in the Black Sea were attacked with rockets on Monday. The originally Ukrainian facilities were occupied in March 2014 as part of the annexation of Crimea.
In eastern Ukraine, the nuclear research facility “Neutron Source” in Kharkiv came under fire again on Sunday. Buildings and infrastructure such as ventilation ducts were damaged, the nuclear regulatory authority said. The part of the facility where the nuclear fuel is stored was not mentioned. No increased radiation was found. Ukraine blamed Russia.
Political developments and voices:
Before his planned video link at the G7 summit at Schloss Elmau in Bavaria, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj has again called for faster arms deliveries to his country. “We need powerful air defense – modern, fully effective,” he said in his daily video speech on Monday night. On Saturday alone, 62 Russian rockets hit his country. Meanwhile, the city of Lysychansk in eastern Ukraine remains fiercely contested.
Any delay in arms deliveries to Ukraine is an invitation to Russia to strike further, Zelensky said. The G7 countries, which include Germany, the US, Canada, the UK, France, Italy and Japan, collectively held so much potential “to stop Russian aggression against Ukraine and Europe,” Zelenskyy said. “There are already some agreements. Partners need to move faster.”
The Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov specifically demanded modern long-range missile defense systems from the West. These would have to be stationed quickly in order to ensure security for European cities, he wrote on Facebook. He called rocket attacks on “peaceful Ukrainian cities” insidious because they were launched either from Russian territory, or from Belarus, or from the Caspian and Black Seas. Reznikov also proposed demilitarization of parts of Russia as a condition for resuming relations between Moscow and the West.
Russia has again tied negotiations with Ukraine to the condition that Kyiv accepts Moscow’s demands. This was said by the head of the Russian Federation Council, Valentina Matviyenko, as reported by the state agency TASS. Moscow’s publicly expressed demands at the beginning of the war included recognizing the eastern Ukrainian separatist areas of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states and the annexed Black Sea peninsula of Crimea in 2014 as Russian state territory.
Zelenskyy called on the people of neighboring Belarus not to get drawn into the Russian war of aggression. “The Kremlin has already decided everything for you,” he said on Sunday with a view of Moscow. “But you are not slaves and cannon fodder. You must not die.” On Saturday, Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko met with Russian President Vladimir Putin again. The Kremlin chief announced the delivery of Iskander-M missile systems to Belarus, which can also be equipped with nuclear warheads.
On the fringes of the G7 summit, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen spoke out against a boycott of the G20 summit in the fall – even if Putin were to attend the next meeting. “We have to think very carefully about whether we paralyze the entire G20, I’m not advocating it,” said von der Leyen from Bavaria to the ZDF “heute journal”. “In my opinion, the G20 is too important, also for the developing countries, the emerging countries, for us to let this body be destroyed again by Putin.”
The new commander of the Bundeswehr Operations Command, Bernd Schütt, sees the greatest danger of a military escalation with Russia on NATO’s north-eastern flank. “And that’s why the point of credible deterrence in this region is a very central point for me. The presence of land forces plays a central role here,” said the lieutenant general of the German Press Agency. There will also be increased exercises for national and alliance defense in his command. Schütt: “We have not yet trained this type of intensive warfare here. There is a need to adapt existing structures and procedures.”
That will be important on Monday
The summit of the seven leading democratic industrial states at Schloss Elmau in the Bavarian Alps continues. President Zelenskyy is expected to speak to the participants via video link. The focus of the three-day meeting, which began on Sunday, is the war and its aftermath.
Also read: The Ukraine update of June 26 – Russia advances, plagues break out in Mariupol: What happened in the night
