Every week we wrap up the must-reads from our coverage of the war in Ukraine, from news and features to analysis, visual guides and opinion.
Russia attacked Lviv with missiles, killing seven
Russia fired cruise missiles at Lviv, a western Ukraine city far from the frontline of the war, killing at least seven people in a block of flats, in what officials said was the heaviest attack on civilian areas of Lviv since the Kremlin’s forces invaded Ukraine last year.
The night-time attack destroyed the roof and top two floors of a residential building, injuring nine people as emergency crews with search dogs went through the rubble.
Debris and wrecked parked cars lined the street outside the building, which overlooks a small neighbourhood park with swings and climbing frames set among trees.
US expected to provide cluster bombs to Ukraine
Human Rights Watch has called on Russia and Ukraine to stop using cluster bombs, Léonie Chao-Fong reports, and urged the US not to supply the munitions to Kyiv, amid reports the Biden administration is poised to include the controversial weapons in a new military aid package.
Russian and Ukraine forces have used cluster bombs, which break apart in the air and release multiple explosive submunitions or “bomblets” across a wide area. They can be delivered by planes, artillery and missiles, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Stoltenberg to stay as Nato chief for another year
Jens Stoltenberg has been asked to extend his tenure as Nato’s secretary general for a further year until October 2024 after members of the western military alliance failed to agree on a replacement before next week’s summit in Vilnius, Dan Sabbagh reported.
In March, in an interview with the Guardian, Stoltenberg said he was ready to step aside from a job he first took in October 2014. “I’ve made it clear that my tenure ends this fall,” he said, predicting that member states would have no difficulty in finding a successor.
Nikopol locals on life without water
Anna Supranova’s home looks on to Kakhovka reservoir in southern Ukraine. Or at least it did. The water has recently vanished. Most of it disappeared in the space of three surreal days last month, after Russian troops blew up the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam farther downstream.
Ever since, Supranova and other residents in the frontline town of Nikopol have been without water, Luke Harding reports. At the bottom of her garden is an unearthly and desolate muddy plain. It stretches as far as the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, visible in the near haze. The civilian facility – occupied by Moscow since the beginning of its invasion – is 5km away.
A Ukrainian army chaplain on war and Russian ‘sadism’
A hundred or more empty graves have been freshly dug into the vast scrubland that is Krasnopillya military cemetery, between the old Dnipro tyre factory and the E50 motorway on the southern perimeter of Ukraine’s fourth-largest city.
Lt Dmytro Povorotnyi concedes that being a chaplain in wartime is a heavy burden. Some here were old friends, sent into battle with his prayers in their heads. The stories behind many of the deaths are haunting. Daniel Boffey spent time with Povorotnyi in Dnipro.
How Russians hunted down veterans of the Donbas conflict
Viktor Kushyn knew Russian soldiers were after him. He sensed it from the first day of Moscow’s full-scale war on Ukraine in February last year, when Russians occupied his village in the Kharkiv region.
So when two Russian service personnel stopped him in the street one morning in May 2022, he didn’t resist. He spent the next few days locked in a cellar with other men who, like him, had fought against Russian-backed separatists between 2014 and 2022 in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
“They beat us savagely for days,” Kushyn, 59, told the Guardian’s Lorenzo Tondo and Alessio Mamo. “Then they took a hot branding iron, pressed it on our skin and branded us with the symbol of a triangle, as is done with cattle. They did it for revenge because they hated us.”
Russia may be open to prisoner swap for Evan Gershkovich
The Kremlin has suggested it could be open to a possible prisoner exchange involving jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, but reaffirmed that such talks must be held away from the public eye.
Asked whether Monday’s consular visits to Gershkovich, who has been held behind bars in Moscow since March on charges of espionage, and Vladimir Dunaev, a Russian citizen in US custody on cybercrime charges, could herald a prisoner swap, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Moscow and Washington had touched on the issue.
“We have said that there have been certain contacts on the subject, but we don’t want them to be discussed in public,” Peskov told reporters. “They must be carried out and continue in complete silence.”
Russian media to erase all traces of Wagner warlord
Suddenly, Yevgeny Prigozhin is a phantom. In unconfirmed footage that makes him look like a Bond villain, he struts across a rooftop, shadowed by a muscled bodyguard, takes a seat in a helicopter and vanishes into the skies of St Petersburg.
For nearly a decade, Prigozhin has sown scandal in Russia, creating a troll factory empire, leading Russia’s interference into foreign elections and bankrolling the Wagner mercenary group that fought in Ukraine and has propped up dictators in Africa, Andrew Roth writes.
Meanwhile in Libya, there has been no abnormal movement of Wagner personnel, other than the redeployment of a small detachment of 50 closer to the border with Sudan, Jason Burke reported. In Africa, despite Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rebellion against the Kremlin, his military contracts are proving too profitable to lose.
And despite a peace deal with the Kremlin under which Prigozhin had agreed to move to Belarus, the country’s president said this week that the warlord is back in Russia, “As for Prigozhin, he’s in St Petersburg. He is not on the territory of Belarus,” Alexander Lukashenko said on Thursday. “Where is Prigozhin this morning? Maybe he left for Moscow.” Pjotr Sauer had this report.
Remembering Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina
The award-winning Ukrainian novelist, essayist and war crimes researcher Victoria Amelina, who was wounded in a Russian missile strike on a restaurant, died this week from her injuries, Emma Graham-Harrison reported.
“Amelina did not leave the huge literary legacy that she might have done, had she been given more time,” novelist Andrey Kurkov wrote. “Yet in her short life, Amelina still managed to achieve a great deal.”
Amelina’s friend Nataliya Gumenyuk wrote about Putin’s targeting of civilians. “Reading that a friend is among the victims makes you feel numb, powerless. You can’t stop thinking: what if they hadn’t been there? The Ukrainian government has identified the Russian agent whom they suspect of reporting the exact location of the restaurant. Everybody knew that it was always full of civilians, media, military on leave. But it was very unlikely that senior commanders would have been there. It is not a military target.”
You can read Amelina’s Poem About A Crow here.
War in Ukraine weighs on Wimbledon
Players at Wimbledon have told how the war in Ukraine is weighing heavily on their minds as Russians are allowed once more to compete, Emine Sinmaz reported.
After being barred in 2022, Russians can take part this year provided they sign neutrality agreements. But Veronika Kudermetova, the second-ranked Russian female player, has suggested tensions remain in the locker room.
“I say ‘hi’ to them, I say ‘hi’. Some people, they reply, some not,” she said.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Elina Svitolina has told how the horrors of the war back home weigh on her every day. She said after her victory over Venus Williams on Monday: “When I wake up, I always check the news.”
