The Ukrainian General Staff has admitted defeat at Sieverodonetsk. In addition, Russian soldiers deliberately destroy “escape bridges” in the city. According to the British secret service, river crossings will determine the course of the war in the future. All news about the attack on Ukraine can be found here in the ticker.
12:36 p.m .: After weeks of fierce fighting, the Ukrainian army claims it has been pushed back from the center of the strategically important city of Sievjerodonetsk in the Donbass region. The Russian army, with the support of its artillery, “partially” managed to push back the Ukrainian soldiers in the city center, the Ukrainian general staff announced on the online service Facebook on Monday.
The governor of the Luhansk region, Serhiy Hajdaj, also reported a “partial” success of the Russian troops on Monday night. Russian forces continued to “destroy” Sieverodonetsk, Hajday said on Facebook.
Moscow is providing its troops in the Luhansk region with “more and more equipment” to “encircle” Sieverodonetsk and neighboring Lysychansk, the Ukrainian regional governor said.
As Hajdaj further reports, the Russian troops are currently deliberately destroying the escape bridges for Ukrainian fighters in order to cut off the escape route. Only one bridge is still passable. “If the bridge collapses after more shelling, the city will truly be cut off. There will be no possibility of leaving Sieverodonetsk in a vehicle,” the governor said. According to him, the bridge is “old and life-threatening”.
12:35 p.m .: Ukraine has specified demands for comprehensive arms deliveries, which the government in Kyiv believes it needs to win the war against Russia. “1000 155mm caliber howitzers, 300 multiple rocket launcher systems, 500 tanks, 2000 armored vehicles, 1000 drones,” Presidential Advisor Mykhailo Podoliak wrote on Twitter on Monday. Kyiv is expecting a decision on this from the meeting of NATO defense ministers next Wednesday in Brussels.
Ukraine has been defending itself against a Russian invasion since late February. According to information from Kyiv, a shortage of heavy weapons and ammunition is making the situation on the more than 2,400-kilometer front increasingly difficult.
12:25 p.m .: According to its own statements, Russia has destroyed a large amount of military equipment and weapons in Ukraine with several rocket attacks. This was announced by the Ministry of Defense in Moscow. Accordingly, some armaments were also destroyed, which were delivered to Ukraine by the USA and states of the European Union. The weapons are said to have been stored near the Udachne train station in eastern Ukraine’s Donbass, which was the target of the Russian missiles.
8:25 a.m.: The British Ministry of Defense has stated in the daily update of the secret service that the river crossings would decide the course of the war. Because: the central part of the front line is west of the river Siverskyy Donets. According to the British MoD, Russia must “either undertake ambitious flanking operations or carry out attack-style river crossings”.
This is explosive, because a few weeks ago a river crossing by the Russians ended in disaster when the Ukrainian troops blew up the makeshift bridge over the Donets River, killing several hundred soldiers of the Russian army.
Often Ukrainian forces manage to destroy bridges before retreating. The Russians face the special challenge of crossing rivers under fire.
8:03 a.m .: The Ukrainian army has acknowledged the loss of the center of the heavily contested city of Sievjerodonetsk in the east of the country. Russian troops shelled the city in the Luhansk region with artillery and drove out the Ukrainian soldiers, the Ukrainian general staff said on Monday morning. The fighting continued, however, it said.
A few hours earlier, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had declared that in the strategically important Sieverodonetsk there was “literally a fight for every meter”. According to their own statements, Ukrainian troops still controlled around a third of the city on Saturday.
For days, Sievjerodonetsk has been the center of heavy fighting in the Luhansk region, more than 90 percent of which Russian and pro-Russian fighters have already captured. The Azot chemical plant in Sievjerodonetsk was also fired upon. According to Ukrainian sources, civilians who used the plant premises as an air raid shelter are still staying there.
3:36 a.m .: According to research by Amnesty International, Russian troops have killed numerous civilians in the eastern Ukrainian region of Kharkiv through the use of cluster munitions. “In Kharkiv, people were killed in their homes and on the streets while they were taking their children to playgrounds, commemorating their loved ones in cemeteries, queuing for aid deliveries or shopping,” reported Janine Uhlmannsiek from the German branch of Amnesty International, citing one new report entitled “Anyone can die at any time”.
The human rights organization accused Russia of repeatedly using cluster munitions and unguided missiles in residential areas and playgrounds since the start of the war of aggression in Ukraine.
Conversely, according to Amnesty International, Ukrainian troops often launch attacks from residential areas, putting the lives of local civilians at risk. “This violates international humanitarian law, but in no way justifies the repeated indiscriminate attacks by Russian troops,” the human rights organization said.
Monday, June 13, 01:54: According to the authorities, four people were injured in an explosion in the Ukrainian city of Melitopol, which was occupied by Russian troops. The occupation authorities assumed that an explosive device had detonated in a rubbish bin next to their local office of the Ministry of the Interior, the Russian news agency Tass reported on Sunday evening.
Only civilians were injured, it said. The information could not be independently verified. Melitopol is located in the Zaporizhia region of Ukraine, part of which is occupied by Russian troops.
9:00 p.m .: A former British soldier has been killed in action in Ukraine, the BBC reports. The man is said to have left the British army in March and traveled to Ukraine to support the country’s armed forces against the Russian invaders. As the man’s father announced on Facebook, he had now died in fighting for the eastern city of Sievjerodonetsk. British authorities said they would support the family of a Briton who died in Ukraine.
The soldier’s father also wrote in a Facebook post: “We have received several messages from his team out there telling us about his wealth of knowledge, his skills as a soldier and his love for his job. His team says they all loved him, as did we. (…). He really was a hero.”
3:59 p.m .: According to Western experts, the Russian army is preparing for a war in Ukraine by autumn. This was reported by the military experts of the US Institute for the Study of the War (ISW), citing information from the Ukrainian secret service deputy director. Russia is therefore expecting a war at least up to and including October.
According to the ISW, the information indicated that the Kremlin does not believe that it will be able to achieve its goals in Ukraine quickly. According to the information, any changes to the plans depend on success in Donbass.
The center of the heaviest fighting in eastern Ukraine remained the city of Sievjerodonetsk in the Luhansk region on Sunday. According to the governor, the situation there is the worst in the country. The General Staff in Kyiv reported a large number of fighting also in the Sloviansk region of the Donetsk region. Again and again there are air attacks against civilian infrastructure.
“It’s impossible to count the shelling,” said the governor of the Luhansk region, Serhiy Hajday, on the situation around Sieverodonetsk. Many towns in the region were under fire , civilians who had fled to the bunkers under the industrial plant had left the factory premises.
According to the Ukrainian General Staff in Kyiv, the Russian troops in the area of the important traffic junction of Bakhmut have been pushed back during the ongoing heavy fighting in the Donbass. Up to 150 attackers were “destroyed”. This information could not be checked independently.
12.40 p.m .: As the spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Defense, Igor Konashenkov, announced on Sunday, more than 150 Ukrainian soldiers were killed in air raids at the front, and six tanks, five artillery pieces and ten army vehicles were destroyed. Two Ukrainian Su-25 fighter jets were shot down by Russian fighter jets, another Ukrainian SU-25 was hit by air defenses. This information cannot be verified independently.
Sunday, June 12, 11:35 a.m.: According to the governor of Ternopil, Volodmyr Trush, Russia shelled the western Ukrainian city of Chortkiv. Four rockets hit, there were 22 injured, he wrote on Telegram. Among other things, a military facility and a skyscraper were hit. There were no deaths.
The Russian Defense Ministry confirmed that “a large storage facility with anti-tank missile systems, man-portable anti-aircraft missile systems and artillery shells” was destroyed in Ternopil. These were weapons that the United States and European countries had supplied to Ukraine. Four long-range Kalibr missiles were fired from a frigate in the Black Sea, according to the Defense Ministry.
7:27 p.m .: The fighting for the city of Sievjerodonetsk in eastern Ukraine continues, according to the Ukrainian military. The Russian army fired on civilian infrastructure in the city and in neighboring Lysychansk and three other places, the General Staff of the Ukrainian Army said on Facebook on Saturday. The Ukrainian soldiers are in the process of resisting Russian attacks in Sieverodonetsk. In the suburb of Metelkino, an attack was successfully repelled and the Russian army withdrew, the situation report said. Fighting continued in another suburb. The information cannot be verified independently.
According to the governor of the Luhansk region, Serhiy Gaidai, the Russian shelling of the Azot chemical plant in Sievjerodonetsk led to a major fire. Tons of oil had previously leaked from the plant. According to Ukrainian information, there are still hundreds of civilians in the factory. It is unclear whether the fire has already been extinguished.
The strategically important industrial city of Sieverodonetsk is the last major city in the Luhansk region not yet fully under Russian and pro-Russian control. They have been fighting for weeks.
6:33 p.m .: Russia no longer wants to comply with judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. President Vladimir Putin signed a corresponding law on Saturday, as reported by the Tass agency. Accordingly, judgments passed after March 15 will no longer be carried out.
The European Court of Human Rights is part of the Council of Europe. The bodies that are independent of the European Union work together to protect human rights in the 47 member states. Russia and Ukraine were both originally members of the Council of Europe.
The body initially suspended Russia’s membership on February 25 following the Russian attack on Ukraine. After the Kremlin declared its withdrawal on March 15, Russia was permanently expelled from the Council of Europe.
5:41 p.m .: At least 287 children have been killed since the start of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, according to the General Prosecutor’s Office in Kyiv. More than 492 were injured, the authority announced on Saturday. The investigations revealed that in addition to the already known cases in the city of Mariupol, 24 other children died as a result of the indiscriminate shelling by the Russian military. These figures are not complete, as the investigations in the currently contested areas and the areas temporarily occupied by Russia and now regained by Ukraine are still ongoing.
Schools and educational institutions were damaged by bombing and shelling in 1971, the Attorney General’s report said. Of these, 194 were completely destroyed. The information cannot be independently verified.
You can read more reports on the Ukraine conflict on the following pages.
