Ukraine says it has launched a counterattack on the occupied territory of Kherson. In the east, the defenders are preparing for a fierce Russian offensive. All news about the war in Ukraine can be found in the ticker.
7:51 p.m .: After a rocket attack on the town of Chasiv Yar in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk, the number of people recovered from a destroyed house has risen to 45. The Ukrainian civil defense spoke on Tuesday of a total of 45 bodies found, including a child. The clearance work continued. It was not known how many people were still missing.
The Ukrainian side accuses Russia of targeting civilians. In Moscow, on the other hand, it is claimed that only a military target was destroyed. The building was a dormitory used by the military. It was attacked by Russian troops three days ago.
2:36 p.m .: The Ukrainian army has apparently significantly increased its attacks in the Cherson region occupied by Russia. According to Ukrainian military information, 52 Russian soldiers are said to have been killed there on Tuesday night and, among other things, an ammunition depot was destroyed. The local pro-Russian administration said Ukrainian missiles had hit civilian homes and infrastructure in the city of Nowa Kakhovka, killing at least seven people.
Ukrainian military officials said the latest rocket attacks in the Kherson region destroyed enemy artillery, armored vehicles and “a warehouse with ammunition in Nowa Kakhovka”. The Ukrainian military intelligence service also said it had freed five Ukrainians from Russian captivity in a special operation in the Cherson region.
Tuesday, July 12, 7:52 a.m.: According to its own statements, the Ukrainian army has started a counter-offensive on the part of the southern Ukrainian region of Cherson occupied by Russian troops. An arms depot was attacked in the city of Nowa Kachowka, the southern command announced on Tuesday night on Facebook.
The Russian state news agency Ria Novosti on Tuesday morning, citing the pro-Russian administration deployed in Nowa Kakhovka, reported two dead, four missing and dozens wounded after the attack. Many people were buried under the rubble. Hundreds of houses were also damaged. The information provided by both sides could not initially be checked independently.
2:55 p.m .: After several deadly rocket attacks in the Donbass region, the Ukrainian army says it is preparing for an even more violent Russian offensive. There are “indications” that “enemy units” are preparing to intensify their attacks in the direction of the cities of Kramatorsk and Bakhmut after a pause in the attacks by Russian ground forces, the General Staff of the Ukrainian Army said on Monday.
At least three people were killed in rocket attacks on residential buildings in the second-largest Ukrainian city of Kharkiv in the north-east of the country, according to the regional government on Monday. In addition, 31 people were injured, mainly by shrapnel.
Overall, Ukrainian authorities reported around 50 attacks on public infrastructure facilities. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Saturday evening accused Russian forces of killing civilians “absolutely deliberately” and promised the perpetrators would be brought to justice.
1:55 p.m .: According to official information, around 7,000 military personnel have been missing in Ukraine since the Russian invasion began four and a half months ago. Among them are soldiers, national guards, border guards and secret service people, said the Ukrainian missing persons officer Oleh Kotenko on public television on Monday. Most of the missing are believed to be in Russian captivity. The army alone registered around 2,000 soldiers as missing.
12:43 p.m .: Russia’s army presented a devastating shelling of the Ukrainian town of Chasiv Yar over the weekend as an attack on purely military targets. A base station of a Ukrainian brigade was destroyed with precision-guided weapons, Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said on Monday. He did not comment on the Ukrainian accusation that it was a targeted attack on a residential area.
In Chasiv Yar, large parts of a block of flats collapsed over the weekend, according to the Ukrainian account, the bodies of 20 residents have been recovered so far. People are still missing. Since the war began four and a half months ago, Russia has repeatedly emphasized that it only hit military targets in the neighboring country – even if the many civilian casualties are now obvious.
08:26: According to the “Institute for the Study of War”, the Russian armed forces will continue their attacks in areas around Bakhmut. The aim is probably to separate and isolate the city in eastern Ukraine from the Ukrainian supply routes in the west and south. This should prepare the next phase of the offensive.
In the past few days, Russian troops had shelled a railway station in Chasiv Yar, about ten kilometers east of Bakhmut. The attack, meanwhile, was aimed at destroying the transport infrastructure. A Russian missile also hit a residential building in the same city, killing around 15 people.
Monday, July 11, 6:11 a.m.: A Russian missile destroyed a residential building in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv early Monday morning. This is reported by “Kyiv Independent”, citing the state rescue service. Accordingly, a six-storey building was hit, rescue workers are on site.
10:13 p.m .: The Ukrainian leadership has called on civilians in the occupied south of the country to flee because of planned army offensives. Residents of the Cherson and Zaporizhia regions should urgently leave their homes – if necessary in the direction of the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which has been annexed by Russia since 2014, Deputy Prime Minister Irina Wereshchuk said on Sunday evening. This was necessary so that people would not be endangered in the course of impending attempts at recapture.
Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said in an interview with the British newspaper The Sunday Times that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had ordered the military to retake southern territory occupied by Western weapons. In particular, the coastal areas are of great importance for the Ukrainian economy. Selenskyj has repeatedly emphasized in the past that his country wants to take back regions controlled by Russia.
12:53 p.m .: In an attack on the eastern Ukrainian city of Sloviansk, Russian troops say they killed up to a hundred enemy soldiers. The missile attack on a ceramics factory, which served as a temporary location and ammunition depot for a Ukrainian artillery unit, also destroyed more than a thousand grenades for US M-777 howitzers, the Defense Ministry in Moscow said on Sunday. Accordingly, 700 grenades for the Grad multiple rocket launcher were also destroyed. The information could not be independently verified.
During dogfights in eastern Ukraine, Russian Su-35 fighters shot down two Ukrainian Su-25 fighter jets and another Mig-29 fighter jet, the report said. The Russian Defense Ministry claims to have shot down 242 Ukrainian planes and 137 helicopters since the start of the war. According to media reports, however, Ukraine only had around 100 aircraft and 90 helicopters in its fleet before the war.
Sunday, July 10, 11:12 a.m.: According to Ukrainian sources, at least 15 people were killed in a Russian rocket attack on a residential building in Chasiv Yar in eastern Ukraine on Sunday. 24 people were still buried under the rubble of the four-story building, said the local rescue service on the online network Facebook. The rescue workers have so far been able to contact three of them. According to the information, five people were rescued alive.
The governor of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, initially said that at least six people had been killed and five others injured in the Russian attack.
The emergency services at the partially collapsed building were supported by an excavator. “I was in the bedroom, I came out and everything started shaking, collapsing,” a resident of the house, who declined to give her name, told AFP.
On Saturday, Governor Kyrylenko announced that in eastern Ukraine “the entire front line was under relentless fire” from the Russian army. Above all, the city of Sloviansk was bombed. Sloviansk and Kramatorsk are the two largest cities in the Donetsk region still under Ukrainian control. Chasiv Yar is located about 50 kilometers south-east of Sloviansk.
The Russian army is currently pursuing the goal of conquering the predominantly Russian-speaking region of Donzek. According to Kyrylenko, 591 civilians have been killed and 1,548 others injured in Donetsk since the beginning of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine on February 24.
10:50 p.m .: According to the authorities, six people were injured in a Russian rocket attack in the center of the second largest Ukrainian city of Kharkiv today. Among them was a 12-year-old girl. The regional prosecutor’s office said an Iskander ballistic missile was believed to have been used in the attack. One of the rockets hit and destroyed a two-story building. Neighboring houses were damaged.
Kharkiv has been the target of attacks since the war began, and the city has been hit several times in the past week. Ukraine’s national police say they are investigating the alleged destruction of crops by the Russian military. In a Telegram post, police accused Russian troops of forbidding residents from putting out fires in fields and otherwise sabotaging crops.
8:31 p.m .: Ukrainian soldiers are apparently mining areas on the border with Belarus. After visiting the positions there, Lieutenant General Serhiy Nayev reported that measures are currently being taken to mine and set up barriers on the border with Belarus. The report “The Kyiv Independent” and “Ukrajinska Pravda” unanimously.
7.30 p.m .: A UN report has assigned Ukrainian troops responsibility for the attack by pro-Russian rebels on a nursing home in the Luhansk region in early March. A few days before the attack, Ukrainian soldiers took up positions in the building in Stara Krasnyanka, effectively making it a target for attacks, according to a report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
On March 11, pro-Russian rebels shot at the facility with heavy weapons, where 71 residents and 15 employees were staying. The exact number of dead has not yet been clarified, at least 22 residents managed to escape. Employees had repeatedly asked in vain for the building to be evacuated in advance, which was not possible due to the presumably mined area.
The UN report is said to be based on testimonies from surviving employees and information from relatives of residents. OHCHR has no figures on how often comparable incidents occur. However, dealing with the nursing home is symbolic of dealing with civilians.
1:36 p.m .: After taking the Luhansk region, according to Ukrainian information, the Russian army is now increasingly targeting the Donetsk region from there. The occupiers launched attacks from Lysychansk towards the west, Ukrainian Luhansk governor Serhiy Hajday said on Saturday. “We are trying to stop the Russian armed groups all along the line.” However, according to Hajdaj, they are attacking from several sides and trying to penetrate deep into the neighboring area.
They create a “real hell” by rocket attacks and artillery fire. However, Ukrainian forces put up a brave resistance, Hajdaj said.
Five people were killed on Friday in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk, as Donetsk Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said on Saturday. “The entire front line is under relentless fire,” he wrote on Friday evening on the Telegram messenger service.
In the Donetsk region, Russia is likely to have its eyes on the larger cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk next. It is Moscow’s declared goal to wrest the region completely from Ukrainian control. According to the Ukrainian General Staff in Kyiv, there was shelling in other parts of the country, including Kharkiv and Chernihiv oblasts. Civilian infrastructure was also hit.
Enemy attacks were repeatedly repelled, it said. Ukrainian air, missile and artillery units fired on concentrations of Russian troops and ammunition dumps. “The enemy has suffered significant losses,” said the General Staff in Kyiv.
1:15 p.m .: According to the Ministry of Defense in Moscow, Russia has once again destroyed western weapons in massive attacks in eastern Ukraine. A hangar with US-supplied M777 howitzers was destroyed near the town of Chasiv Yar in the Donetsk region, ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in Moscow on Saturday. Accordingly, numerous Ukrainian soldiers were killed there. This information could not be verified by an independent party.
Dozens of Ukrainian soldiers were also killed in artillery and rocket attacks in the Mykolaiv region in the south of the country, in the Dnipropetrovsk region around the city of Dnipro and other parts of the country, and military technology and some ammunition stores were destroyed, said Konashenkov. He showed a video of combat missions and maps showing the directions of the Russian armed forces.
Foreign fighters were also killed. In the Mykolaiv region, the air force also shot down two Ukrainian Sukhoi Su-25 fighter jets. In addition, the Russian air defense took down another 15 combat drones within 24 hours. This information was also not independently verifiable. The Ukrainian general staff reported Russian attacks on a broad front in Kyiv in the morning.´
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