Here is the situation on Wednesday, June 19, 2024.
Fighting
- Ukrainian forces launched an overnight drone attack that set several oil storage tanks ablaze in southern Russia’s Rostov region, defence sources in Kyiv told the AFP and Associated Press news agencies. The local governor, Vasily Golubev, said there had been a fire at a storage facility, while a video from Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Situations showed thick smoke and flames billowing out of what appeared to be multiple oil storage tanks in an undisclosed location.
- Ukraine’s national grid operator Ukrenergo said the country would face rolling electricity blackouts on Wednesday to try and ensure supplies after a string of Russian attacks on Ukrainian power plants.
- Ukraine’s Air Force said air defence systems destroyed all 10 drones that Russia launched overnight targeting the regions of Zaporizhia and Dnipropetrovsk. There were no reports of damage or injuries.
Politics and diplomacy
- Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Pyongyang for his first visit in 24 years, amid concerns North Korea is supplying weapons to Moscow for use in Ukraine. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un met Putin at the airport and state media said the two countries were committed to creating a “new multi-polar world”.
- Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin said his office was investigating the suspected beheading of one of its soldiers by Russian forces in an occupied part of the eastern Donetsk region after aerial reconnaissance showed what appeared to be a severed head on an armoured vehicle.
- Ukraine jailed a man in the eastern Donetsk region for 15 years after he was found guilty of passing sensitive military information to Russian forces. The regional prosecutor’s office said the man, who was not identified but lived in a village near the front line, had committed high treason by passing information on the location of Ukrainian troops in the area to Russian forces.
- An Estonian court jailed Viacheslav Morozov, a former professor of political theory at the University of Tartu and a Russian citizen, to six years and three months for spying for Moscow, the country’s public broadcaster ERR reported. Morozov was arrested in January and accused of gathering information about Estonia’s internal, defence and security policy, as well as people and infrastructure related to it, ERR said.
- The Ukrainian president’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, said officials had started preparatory work to organise a second peace summit, following last weekend’s first conference in Switzerland. More than 90 delegations attended that event, but Russia was not invited. Some non-aligned countries declined to sign the closing statement.
