Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has praised his forces for hitting military targets inside Russia, after his army reported several strikes including on an airfield and an oil depot. “I would like to thank each of our soldiers and all those who work in our defence industry for striking Russian airfields, oil refineries and logistics,” Zelenskiy said in his daily statement. Kyiv has stepped up aerial attacks on Russian territory, saying it carries out the strikes in retaliation for the bombardments that Ukraine has faced since Russia invaded more than two years ago. “Every strike that accurately responds to Russia’s bombs, that destroys Russian logistics, Russian bases, that makes it more difficult for the occupier to stay on our land. Every such strike brings the just end of the war closer,” he added. Russian officials did not address claims regarding the destroyed airfield, but local governor Vasily Golubev said on Telegram that authorities had introduced a state of emergency in the district of Morozovsk.
Russian officials said Ukrainian forces overnight targeted multiple Russian regions with a massive drone barrage. Russia’s defense ministry said in a statement that its air defence systems “intercepted and destroyed” a total of 75 drones over a number of regions that lie on the border with Ukraine or not far from it, including Belgorod, Krasnodar, Kursk, Oryol, Rostov, Voronezh, and the Ryazan region deeper inside Russia. Rostov governor, Vasily Golubev, said the region was attacked by a total of 55 drones, but didn’t specify how many of these were intercepted and how many hit the targets, saying only that “warehouse facilities” in the Morozovsk and Kamensky districts sustained damage in the attack.
Ukraine’s air forces says Russia launched an overnight attack over its territory with 29 Shahed drones and four missiles. Ukrainian air defenses shot down 24 drones over nine regions of the country, air force commander Mykola Oleshchuk said in an online statement. It wasn’t clear from his statement whether the missiles were intercepted as well or what damage the attack caused.
Ukraine is calling for urgent investigation of an image widely shared online that it says likely showed a Ukrainian prisoner of war killed and dismembered by Russian forces. Dmytro Lubinets, the country’s leading human rights official has appealed to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the United Nations to look into the photograph, “probably of a Ukrainian prisoner whose head and limbs were cut off by the Russians”. “In view of these horrific images, I have urgently appealed to the ICRC and the UN to record yet another human rights violation by the terrorist country,” Lubinets said in a post on the Telegram messaging app. Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Andriy Kostin, said an urgent investigation has been launched. “Russia consistently repeats the crimes of the Nazis, defiantly showing utter contempt for all norms of the civilised world,” Kostin said. Russia has denied torture or other forms of maltreatment of PoW.
Russian shelling of a residential area killed one person and injured two in a strategic logistical hub in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, the regional governor said. “The Russians hit civilians on purpose and regularly,” Vadym Filashkin, the Donetsk regional governor, wrote on the Telegram messaging app. Rescue workers were still dousing the flames two hours after the impact, which police at the scene blamed on a UMPB D-30 glide bomb. Russia has been steadily inching forward on several fronts in Donetsk, staging particularly fierce attacks near Pokrovsk.
The average daily Russian casualties in Ukraine has fallen over the past two months from a conflict high of over 1,262 a day in May to 1,140 in July 2024, according to the latest intelligence briefing from the UK Ministry of Defence. Despite this reduction, the last three months have been the costliest for Russian forces since February 2022 based on Ukrainian General Staff reporting. The reduction in daily average is likely indicative of Russian forces consolidating positions on the Kharkiv axis. Russia’s casualty rate will probably continue to average above 1,000 a day throughout August 2024 as it continues offensive operations on a wide front from Kharkiv in the north to Robotyne in the south of Ukraine, the ministry said.
