Here is how things stand on Monday, July 7:
Fighting
- Russian forces launched missile and drone attacks on the eastern Ukrainian province of Donetsk, killing four people in the town of Kostiantynivka and another in nearby Druzhkivka, according to officials.
- Donetsk Governor Vadim Filashkin urged residents of the front-line towns to evacuate, saying: “It is dangerous to stay here! Evacuate to safer regions of Ukraine!”
- Elsewhere in Ukraine, large-scale Russian drone attacks wounded three civilians in Kyiv, two in Kharkiv, and damaged port infrastructure in the central region of Mykolaiv, according to the governor.
- A woman who was wounded in a Russian attack on the city of Poltava in central Ukraine on July 3 died in hospital, taking the death toll from that attack to three, local officials said.
- Russia’s Ministry of Defence said that Russian forces seized the village of Piddubne in the Donetsk region and the village of Sobolivka, near the town of Kupiansk, in the Kharkiv region.
- Ukraine, too, launched drone attacks on Russia, injuring two civilians in Belgorod near the border and disrupting flights at airports in the capital, Moscow.
- Russia’s aviation agency, Rosaviatsia, said that the Ukrainian attacks forced at least three airports in Moscow, St Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod to ground some 287 flights on Sunday.
- Russia’s Defence Ministry said its air defences shot down 120 Ukrainian drones during nighttime attacks, and 39 more before 2pm Moscow time (11:00 GMT) on Sunday.
- Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin later said that Russian air defence units downed six Ukrainian drones headed for Moscow.
Sanctions
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed a new sanctions package, “targeting numerous Russian financial schemes, particularly cryptocurrency-related ones”.
Politics and diplomacy
- Russian President Vladimir Putin is not attending the BRICS summit in Brazil this week, since he is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for his role in the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Brazil is a signatory to the Rome Statute, and would be required to enforce the arrest warrant.
- Putin, speaking via a videolink, told the BRICS leaders that the era of liberal globalisation is obsolete and that the future belongs to swiftly growing emerging markets, which should enhance the use of their national currencies for trade.
