Here is the situation on Thursday, June 6, 2024.
Fighting
- One person was killed and four injured in Russian bombardments near the town of Toretsk in the frontline eastern Donetsk region, while one more civilian was injured in a Russian aerial attack on the town of Selydove, Ukrainian officials said.
- One person was injured in Ukraine’s Poltava region as Russia launched a wave of Shahed attack drones across southern, central and northern regions of the country. The air force said it destroyed 22 of the 27 drones. Some buildings were damaged, but there were no other reports of casualties.
- Ukrenergo, Ukraine’s power grid operator, ordered immediate power cuts in 12 regions across the country because it was “catastrophically short of electricity”. Russia has been targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in recent attacks.
- Officials said Ukrainian men aged 18-60 who have permanent residency in other countries would no longer be allowed to leave Ukraine if they visited as Kyiv tries to boost its military ranks
Politics and diplomacy
- Russian President Vladimir Putin repeated that Moscow would not rule out using nuclear weapons if it felt Russia’s sovereignty or territory was threatened. In his first news conference with senior editors from international news agencies, including Reuters and The Associated Press, since launching his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Putin also warned of the risks to Ukraine’s Western allies in providing weapons to help Kyiv defend itself.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Qatar and thanked Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani for Qatar’s role in bringing home Ukrainian children forcibly deported to Russia and supporting Ukraine’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity”.
- United States President Joe Biden is expected to hold talks with Zelenskyy as they join Western leaders in Normandy on Thursday to mark the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings.
- French President Emmanuel Macron confirmed he would attend the June 15-16 peace summit for Ukraine that is taking place in Switzerland.
- Andriy Sybiha, Ukraine’s first deputy foreign minister, visited China and urged it to send a delegation to the peace summit. Beijing said last week that it would not attend the event, and made no mention of the request in its statement on Sybiha’s visit.
- A Moscow court sentenced Russian blogger Anna Bazhutova to five and a half years in prison for spreading “false” information after she livestreamed witness testimony about alleged Russian atrocities during its occupation of Bucha, northwest of Kyiv
- Yuri Malev, a US-Russian man, was jailed for three and a half years for mocking a patriotic ribbon associated with the Russian army, the Saint Petersburg court service said. Malev was arrested in December over two social media posts shared in June 2022 and May 2023.
-
Russian opposition activist Ilya Yashin, a close ally of the late opposition leader Alexey Navalny and imprisoned for criticising the war in Ukraine, lost a court appeal against being designated as a “foreign agent”, Russian news outlets reported. The 40-year-old was jailed in December 2022 for eight and a half years on charges of spreading “false information” about the Russian army.
-
Russia’s Supreme Court rejected an appeal by sociologist and activist Boris Kagarlitsky against his five-year prison sentence for “justifying terrorism”, the TASS state news agency reported. Kagarlitsky, 65, is a longtime political dissident and has spoken out repeatedly against the Ukraine war on his YouTube channel and in a magazine he edited.
Weapons
- The US is expected to announce a new $225m weapons package for Ukraine this week, Reuters reported, citing sources it did not name.
