Summary
Thank you for joining us for today’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine.
We will be pausing our live reporting overnight and returning in the morning.
In the meantime, you can read our comprehensive summary of the day’s events below.
- Russia has declared victory in the eastern Ukrainian region of Luhansk, a day after Ukrainian forces withdrew from their last remaining stronghold in the province. On Monday, Russia’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, told Putin that “the operation” in Luhansk was complete. The Russian president said the military units “that took part in active hostilities and achieved success, victory” in Luhansk “should rest, increase their combat capabilities”.
- Ukraine has laid out a $750bn (£620bn) ‘recovery plan’ for its postwar future. Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said the eventual restoration of his country is the common task of the entire democratic world at the first international conference to map out a physical future for Ukraine in the event it survives as a western-facing nation after the Russian invasion.
- Ukrainian forces are set to raise the country’s flag on Snake Island, a strategic and symbolic outpost in the Black Sea that Russian troops retreated from last week after months of heavy bombardment. Ukraine’s military earlier stated that the national flag had been returned to the island shortly before 11pm on Monday. However, Natalia Humeniuk, spokeswoman for Ukraine’s southern military command, later confirmed in an interview with CNN: “The flag was delivered to the island by helicopter. It will wait for the arrival of the troops, then it will wave.”
- A British citizen who has been sentenced to death by a Russian proxy court in eastern Ukraine has launched an appeal against the verdict. Aiden Aslin, 28, a British-Ukrainian former care worker from Nottinghamshire who was a Ukrainian marine, was captured by Russian forces in the besieged city of Mariupol in April.
- UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, has said alternative routes to retrieve grain stuck in Ukraine would need to be looked at, including through Europe’s Danube River, if it cannot be moved via the Bosphorus strait in Turkey. “The Turks are absolutely indispensable to solving this. They’re doing their very best… We will increasingly have to look at alternative means of moving that grain from Ukraine if we cannot use the sea route, if you can’t use the Bosphorus,” he told parliament on Monday.
- Turkey has halted a Russian-flagged cargo ship off its Black Sea coast and is investigating a Ukrainian claim that it was carrying stolen grain, a senior Turkish official said on Monday.
- Ukraine is holding talks with Turkey and the United Nations to secure guarantees for grain exports from Ukrainian ports, Zelenskiy said. “Talks are in fact going on now with Turkey and the UN [and] our representatives who are responsible for the security of the grain that leaves our ports,” Ukraine’s president told a news conference alongside the Swedish prime minister, Magdalena Andersson.
- Ukraine has renewed its invitation for Pope Francis to visit the country and urged the pontiff to continue praying for the Ukrainian people, a foreign ministry spokesperson said.
- Western envoys in China have criticised Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, with the US ambassador saying China should not spread Russian “propaganda”, during an unusual public forum in a country that has declined to condemn Moscow’s attack.
- Russian forces hit a secondary school in the Kharkiv district at 4am on Monday, according to a report from Oleh Synyehubov, governor of the region.
- The self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic has claimed that in the last 24 hours Ukrainian forces have shelled 15 of the 240 settlements they say they control. They claim that “five people were killed and another 20 civilians were injured”.
- Britain is proposing a new law that will require social media companies to proactively tackle disinformation posted by foreign states such as Russia. The law would tackle fake accounts on platforms such as Meta’s Facebook and Twitter that were set up on behalf of foreign states to influence elections or court proceedings, the government said in an announcement on Monday.
Satellite images reportedly show Russia regularly exporting Ukrainian grain to Turkey via Crimea.
An investigation by journalists from Radio Free Europe found Russian and Syrian vessels transporting Ukrainian grain from the newly-occupied parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts via Sevastopol to Turkish ports.
The outlet says the images bolster accusations that Russia is transporting huge quantities of stolen Ukrainian grain to Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria.
RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service said it documented a series of shipments through the largest grain terminal in Russian-occupied Crimea.
