Closing summary
The blog is now closing. Below is a roundup of today’s stories:
At least two people have been killed and 19 injured in a Russian drone attack on the northern Ukrainian city of Sumy. A five-year-old boy was among the injured. An official building and two residential buildings were damaged in an attack carried out with four drones, the regional administration said on Telegram.
The US ambassador to Russia met with jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich in Moscow. Lynne Tracy met with Gershkovich on Monday after being granted access, her second visit since his detention in March. She has accused Russia of conducting “hostage diplomacy.” On Thursday, Antony Blinken, US secretary of state, told reporters that the country has tried to get consular access to Gershkovich “virtually every day.”
Russia has brought 700,000 children from the conflict zones of Ukraine into Russian territory, the head of the international committee in the Federation Council, Russia’s upper house of parliament, has said. Grigory Karasin said on the Telegram app: “In recent years, 700,000 children have found refuge with us, fleeing the bombing and shelling from the conflict areas in Ukraine.” Moscow claims its programme of bringing children from Ukraine into Russian territory is to protect orphans and children abandoned in conflict zones.The international criminal court has issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin over the alleged forced deportation of children.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy told CNN that the war would not be over while Crimea was under Russian occupation. “We cannot imagine Ukraine without Crimea. And while Crimea is under the Russian occupation, it means only one thing: the war is not over yet,” he said. Asked whether there was any scenario under which there could be peace without Crimea, Zelensky said: “It will not be victory then.”
Ukraine’s deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar has restated that Ukraine is making incremental gains in both the east and the south, and said that 37.4 sq km (14.4 sq m) of territory had been reclaimed. On the Telegram messaging app Maliar said Ukrainian forces were advancing in the Bakhmut direction, adding that Russian forces were attacking in the Lyman, Avdiivka and Mariinka directions in the Donetsk region. She said: “Heavy fighting is going on there now.”
Ukrainian authorities have charged a former top security official with treason, says Kyiv’s domestic intelligence agency. Oleh Kulinich, who headed the security service of Ukraine’s (SBU) Crimea directorate, was arrested last July over accusations of recruiting other Russian-friendly operatives on orders from Moscow. If convicted, Kulinich faces up to 15 years in prison.
Russia’s top election official has warned President Vladimir Putin that the Russian Federation may need to abandon plans to hold elections in the regions it claims to have annexed from Ukraine in September, depending on the military situation at the time. It is currently planned that the five regions would hold regional and municipal elections on 10 September, along with the rest of the Russian Federation.
An international office to investigate Russia’s invasion of Ukraine opened on Monday in The Hague, in the first step towards a possible tribunal for Moscow’s leadership. It will investigate and gather evidence in a move seen as an interim step before the creation of a special tribunal that could bring Kremlin officials to justice for starting the Ukraine war.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent comments about payments to the Wagner group was “like direct evidence” that Wagner’s mercenaries were an illegal arm of the Russian army in the war, Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Andriy Kostin, has said while in The Hague.
There is no need for a further mobilisation in Russia to replace Wagner fighters who have left the battlefield in Ukraine after a short-lived mutiny, Russian state media said on Monday, quoting Andrey Kartapolov, head of the state duma’s defence committee.
The Russian-imposed leader in occupied Kherson, Andrey Alekseyenko, has stated that the damage to the Chongar Bridge linking Kherson and Crimea has been repaired. It was struck by Ukrainian forces in June.
Russia’s state-owned news agency Tass reports that Russian security forces have claimed to have foiled a plot to assassinate the Russian-imposed head of Crimea. It claims Sergei Aksyonov was to be targeted with a car bomb. The Russian Federation illegally seized Crimea in 2014.
The European Union is considering a proposal to allow a Russian bank under sanctions to carve out a subsidiary that would reconnect to the global financial network, the Financial Times has reported. The move would be aimed at safeguarding the Black Sea grain deal that allows Ukraine to export food to global markets, the newspaper said on Monday. A Kremlin spokesperson said there were “not too many hopes" Black Sea grain deal would be extended.
Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, is due to meet the UK’s foreign secretary, James Cleverly, on Monday.
Deputy UN spokesperson Farhan Haq has commented on the Black Sea grain deal that is set to expire this month, telling reporters on Monday that officials had been in touch with “a number of nations, including European nations, to find creative ways in which exports of food and fertiliser from the Russian Federation could be expedited.”
The Financial Times reported on Monday that the EU was considering a proposal for the Russian Agricultural Bank to set up a subsidiary to reconnect to the global financial network, as an incentive for Moscow to extend the deal.
In response, Olha Trofimtseva, Ukraine’s foreign ministry ambassador at large, said the EU wanted “to somehow facilitate the grain deal”.
“On the one hand, any opportunities for agricultural exports are good. On the other hand, making concessions to a blackmailer means encouraging him to continue blackmailing,” she wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
