Bitter fighting in eastern Ukraine continues. According to the regional governor, the battle for Sieverodonetsk is increasingly being fought in the villages. Ukraine reports that a Russian ship has sunk after being hit by a rocket. You can find all the news about the attack on Ukraine in the ticker.
9:05 p.m .: Russian troops destroyed oil tanks near the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro with a rocket attack on Saturday. The regional administration reported three rockets hit the depot in the Novomokovsk district. “There is a strong fire,” wrote the governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region Valentyn Reznichenko on Telegram. Three people were taken to hospital with burns.
Russian missiles struck a factory that processes gas near the city of Izyum in eastern Ukraine. There was also a big fire there, as the governor of the Kharkiv region, Oleh Synyehubov, announced. In addition to the factory, houses were also hit. No information was given about the victims in this case.
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7:59 p.m .: The Russian army has gained ground near the heavily contested administrative center Sievjerodonetsk, but is still unable to take the former city itself. “Due to the shelling and storm, the enemy achieved partial success in the village of Metyolkine and is trying to establish itself there,” the Ukrainian General Staff said in its situation report on Saturday evening. Metyolkine is located south-east of Sievjerodonetsk.
Chechen ruler Ramzan Kadyrov had previously stated that Russian forces had taken the town. Thousands of Chechens are fighting in the Russian armed forces in Ukraine.
According to Ukrainian sources, the fighting for Sievjerodonetsk itself continues. Accordingly, the Russian troops shelled the administrative center of the Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine with heavy artillery. However, an attempted storming of the Ukrainian positions in the city’s industrial area failed. Russian storming attempts were also unsuccessful in Syrotyne, a village west of Metjolkine.
1:32 p.m .: According to Ukrainian information, the battle for the strategically important city of Sievjerodonetsk in eastern Ukraine is increasingly being fought in the surrounding villages. “The fiercest fighting is currently taking place near Sievjerodonetsk,” Luhansk regional governor Serhiy Hajday reported on Saturday in the Messenger service Telegram. Russian troops and their separatist allies have so far failed in their attempts to capture the villages.
“Our defenders are fighting the Russians in all directions. Recently they shot down a plane and took prisoners,” Hajdaj explained.
According to him, the city of Sievjerodonetsk is still not under full Russian control. Meanwhile, for the people in neighboring Lyssychansk, the situation is becoming increasingly dangerous: since the Russian troops are unable to advance, “they simply bombard the city from the air,” explained the governor.
The United Nations said on Friday that Sieverodonetsk had little access to clean water, food and electricity. The humanitarian situation in many parts of eastern Ukraine is “extremely alarming”.
7:47 a.m .: The tugboat of the Russian Black Sea Fleet hit by Ukrainian rockets has sunk, according to Ukrainian authorities. The tug “Vasily Bech” was damaged by Ukrainian missiles in the morning. “Later it became known that it sank,” said Odessa’s military governor, Maxym Marchenko, in a video address on his Telegram channel on Thursday evening. There is no confirmation from Russian or independent sources for the sinking.
The Ukrainian Navy had already reported the shelling on Thursday. According to the report, the ship, which was commissioned in 2017 and equipped with a “Tor” air defense system, was hit by Harpoon missiles and badly damaged. Denmark delivered the anti-ship missiles to Ukraine. The smuggler was therefore with military equipment on the way to the strategically important “snake island”, which has been occupied by Russian troops since the end of February.
The “Vasily Bech” would not be the first ship that the Russian Black Sea Fleet lost in the war against Ukraine. The loss of the landing ship Saratov and the missile cruiser Moskva was confirmed by the Russian side. Above all, the sinking of the “Moskva” as the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet was a painful loss for the Russian Navy.
Saturday, June 18, 6:15 a.m .: According to their military leadership, Ukrainian troops have recaptured a village in the contested east of the country from Russian troops. On Friday evening, the general staff named the village of Dmytrivka near Izyum in the Kharkiv region. The information was not independently verifiable.
Initially, the advance beyond the city of Izyum led the Russian attackers far behind the Ukrainian defenders of Donbass. Western sources such as the US Institute for War Studies (ISW) reported successful Ukrainian counterattacks in the Izyum region on Thursday.
According to Ukrainian sources, in the easternmost city of the front line, Sieverodonetsk in the Luhansk region, every street was fought over. The city and its surroundings are under heavy artillery fire. According to reports, several hundred civilians are still in bunkers under the Azot chemical plant in Sievjerodonetsk.
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4:27 p.m .: The governor of the Luhansk Oblast, which is almost completely occupied by Russian units and separatists, Sergei Haidai, sees practically no possibility of evacuation for the refugees in the chemical plant in Sievjerodonetsk. Political journalist Samuel Ramani writes this on Twitter, citing Haidai.
According to Haidai, Ukraine assumes that there are currently 568 people including 38 children in the Azot chemical plant. The governor calculates that those trapped have a one percent chance of surviving. The situation is reminiscent of the siege of the Mariupol steelworks, where thousands of soldiers and hundreds of civilians holed up for several weeks.
3:23 p.m .: A Russian warship has entered Danish waters near the Baltic Sea island of Bornholm. The corvette drove twice into the country’s sovereign waters north of the island of Christiansø near Bornholm on Friday night, the Danish defense command said. After a radio message from the Danish Navy, the ship left the area immediately.
Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod summoned the Russian ambassador because of the incident. It was a deeply irresponsible and completely unacceptable provocation during Folkemødet, Kofod explained on Twitter, referring to an annual political event that is currently taking place on Bornholm again. “Bully methods don’t work against Denmark,” he wrote.
1:36 p.m .: At least two people were killed and 20 others injured in a Russian attack on the city of Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine on Friday morning. As reported by the governor of the region Vitaly Kim in the online service Telegram, the rocket attack occurred in a residential area. Earlier in the morning, he had announced that four high-rise buildings and an infrastructure facility had been hit by Russian missiles, without specifying whether it was a military facility. A child is among the injured.
The port and industrial city of Mykolaiv had almost half a million inhabitants before the war and is still in Ukrainian hands. However, it is not far from the city of Kherson, which has been under Russian control since shortly after the start of the crisis. As Mykolaiv is on the route to Odessa, Ukraine’s largest port, the city is an important strategic destination for Russia.
In March, an administrative building in Mykolaiv was hit by a Russian attack, killing more than a dozen people.
Even if the fighting in the south of Ukraine is less fierce than in the Donbass in the east, Russians and Ukrainians regularly engage in artillery battles there too.
11:49 a.m .: In the Black Sea, the Ukrainian military claims to have attacked and severely damaged a Russian tugboat with rockets. Reports that it was even sunk have not yet been confirmed.
Even the air defense system on board was unable to repel the attack by the Ukrainian naval forces, the Ukrainian Navy announced on social networks on Friday. The ship, which was put into service in 2017, was supposed to bring ammunition, weapons and soldiers to Snake Island, which has been occupied by Russia since the end of February.
The military governor of Odessa, Maxym Marchenko, initially wrote about the use of Western “Harpoon” missiles. He later changed his entry to the Telegram news service. There was initially no confirmation from the Russian fleet.
Ukraine has been repelling a Russian invasion for almost four months. Kyiv is dependent on Western arms supplies. Harpoon anti-ship missiles have been supplied by Denmark.
9:24 a.m .: According to British intelligence experts, Russian troops in Ukraine have continued their efforts to close the ring around the city of Sievjerodonetsk from the south. “In the past 24 hours, Russian forces have probably continued to try to gain the upper hand on the Popasna axis, from which they plan to encircle the Sievarodonetsk pocket from the south,” the website said in the daily update on the Ukraine war by the British Ministry of Defense on Friday morning.
Despite polls suggesting that the majority of Russians support the war in Ukraine, there are “elements” of the Russian population that are actively and passively expressing opposition, the British experts said. A Russian-recruited unit called the Freedom for Russia Legion almost certainly takes part in combat operations alongside the Ukrainian armed forces.
The skepticism about the war is particularly great in circles of the business elite and the oligarchs. Exit requests suggested that $15,000 millionaires were attempting to leave Russia, the intelligence update said.
Since the start of Russia’s war of aggression almost four months ago, the British government has regularly released intelligence information about its progress. Moscow accuses London of a targeted disinformation campaign.
8:57 a.m .: According to Ukrainian sources, the Azot chemical plant in the heavily contested administrative center Sievjerodonetsk was almost completely destroyed by Russian artillery and rocket fire. Most recently, a building and the gatehouse were destroyed by the shelling. “There are no surviving administrative buildings on the territory of the chemical giant,” wrote the military governor of the eastern Ukrainian region of Luhansk, Serhiy Hajday, on his Telegram channel. But the fighting for the city would continue.
The General Staff made similar statements in its situation report: “The fighting for complete control of Sievjerodonetsk is continuing,” it says. The enemy is moving more rocket artillery into the area. The General Staff and Hajdaj unanimously reported repelling a ground attack on the Sieverodonetsk suburb of Zolote.
The Russian troops have meanwhile taken all the residential areas in Sieverodonetsk, and the Ukrainian defenders have entrenched themselves in the industrial zone around the chemical plant. Attempts to evacuate civilians, who are also said to be staying in the facility, have so far failed.
According to the general staff, a Russian offensive further west on another strategic target, the Sloviansk conurbation, has failed for the time being. The attempt by the Russians to take control of the village of Bohorodichne, 20 kilometers north of Sloviansk, on the opposite bank of the Seversky Donets river was repulsed.
There are Russian airstrikes in the direction of Avdiivka in the Donetsk region, heavy artillery shelling in southern Ukraine on the border between the Kherson and Mykolaiv regions, while the Ukrainians there, according to their own statements, made several airstrikes on Russian positions. The information cannot be verified independently.
You can read more reports on the Ukraine conflict on the following pages.
