Here is the situation on Thursday, July 4, 2024.
Fighting
- At least five people were killed and dozens injured in a Russian missile and drone attack on the southeastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro.
- At least one person was killed and 14 injured in a series of Russian attacks that struck Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region, including the regional capital of Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city.
- At least one person was killed and three injured in a Russian missile attack on Ukraine’s Poltava region. Regional governor Filip Pronin said one person was in critical condition.
- The United Nations human rights office (OHCHR) said Russia’s use of air-dropped bombs led to more civilian casualties in Ukraine between March and May. OHCHR found that the Russian offensive in the Kharkiv region from May 10 to 31 killed 78 civilians and injured 305 more. Between March and May, at least 436 civilians were killed and 1,760 injured in Ukraine, according to the agency.
- Moscow-appointed officials at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine said a Ukrainian drone attack on a nearby electricity substation injured eight workers and left the plant’s dormitory town of Enerhodar without power and water.
- Russia’s Ministry of Defence said its forces destroyed two Ukrainian sea drones targeting the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, a key naval base and hub for oil shipments. No casualties or damage were reported.
Politics and diplomacy
- A military court in Moscow jailed three brothers for treason for trying to cross into Ukraine to join a unit of Russians fighting on Kyiv’s side. Ioann Ashcheulov, 24, was sentenced to 17-and-a-half years while his brothers – Alexei, 20, and Timofey, 19 – were handed 17 years, Russian state media reported.
- A court in Rostov-on-Don found a 19-year-old man guilty of treason for allegedly donating money to Kyiv’s military and sentenced him to 12 years in prison.
- A court in Saint Petersburg more than doubled the sentence for activist and documentary filmmaker Vsevolod Korolev to seven years after he and the prosecutors appealed his original jail term of three years for criticising the Russian offensive against Ukraine on social media. Korolev has been in pre-trial detention since July 2022,
- Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping discussed Ukraine when they met on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Astana, and agreed that peace talks on Ukraine without Russia’s presence were pointless.
- Also meeting on the SCO sidelines, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told Putin that Ankara could help end the conflict, but Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Erdogan could not play the role of an intermediary. He did not say why.
- The Netherlands’ new Prime Minister Dick Schoof assured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a phone call that his country’s support for Ukraine would remain “rock solid”.
- Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said he discussed bilateral cooperation and exchanged views on “a number of regional and global threats posed by Russia, Iran and North Korea” with Israeli counterpart Israel Katz.
Weapons
- The United States announced $150m in new military assistance for Ukraine. The package includes missiles for HAWK air defence systems, ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), 155mm and 105mm artillery rounds, 81mm mortar rounds, TOW (Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided) missiles, Javelin and AT-4 antiarmour systems, as well as a range of other small arms ammunition and equipment.
- NATO allies agreed to fund military aid for Ukraine with 40 billion euros ($43bn) next year, two Western European diplomats told the Reuters news agency, a week before the alliance’s leaders are set to meet in Washington.
- The Czech Ministry of Defence said that the country had donated equipment from its army storage, including aircraft and ammunition, worth 6.75 billion crowns ($288.42m) to Ukraine as of the end of May.
