Vladimir Putin has told graduates of military academies that Russia’s new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles will soon be deployed for combat duty. Listen to Moscow correspondent Diana Magnay talk about a decade of reporting inside Russia while you scroll.
Thursday 22 June 2023 18:01, UK
A Ukrainian official has reported that a large explosion rocked the occupied city of Berdiansk in the early hours of this morning.
The blast happened at about 1.40am just outside the city, said Petro Andriushchenko, advisor to the mayor of Mariupol.
Local reports also said a Russian barracks at the Troyanda resort facility in the village of Azovske was targeted.
A fire reportedly broke out at the scene.
A few days ago, Mr Andriushchenko said Russian forces were transporting ammunition in boxes from Mariupol to Berdiansk.
The United Nations has added Russia’s armed forces to a global list of offenders.
Russian forces and affiliated groups were verified to have killed 136 children in Ukraine last year, a report to the UN Security Council found.
The UN also verified that the forces maimed 518 children and carried out 480 attacks on schools and hospitals.
Ninety-one children were used as human shields, according to the report.
Ukrainian armed forces killed 80 children, maimed 175 children and carried out 212 attacks on schools and hospitals, the report verified.
The Ukrainian armed forces are not on the global offenders list.
Thick smoke and flames engulfed a high-rise building in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, this morning.
Three people have been killed in the incident, thought to have been caused by a gas leak.
Vladimir Putin held an unannounced meeting of his Security Council today to discuss the country’s military strategy against Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensive.
The Russian president told the council that the West was pushing Kyiv to “fight with Russia up until the last Ukrainian”.
An advert posted on the Russian social media site VKontakte showed the mercenary group was looking for video games enthusiasts to become drone pilots.
The ideal candidate would be aged 21 to 35, in good physical shape with experience in flight simulation computer games, and who was used to sitting “straight for hours playing”.
It added that combat experience wasn’t necessary and that Wagner employees are guaranteed tuition by trained instructors, health and life insurance, modern equipment, and regular payment.
“I’ve got 20 years of experience on Call of Duty. Will you take me?” one person commented on the advert.
A Wagner recruiter wrote: “You realise that this isn’t a game? You’d be at war.”
Another said he had over 7,000 hours of experience in computer flight simulations, but was 42.
Wagner replied, telling him he could still apply to fly quadcopters as a member of a close-combat unit.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has banned the commercial import of books from Russia, in his latest move to reduce cultural ties between the two countries.
“I believe the law is right,” the Ukrainian president wrote on Telegram, announcing he had signed a bill which also bans the commercial import of books printed in Belarus and occupied Ukrainian territory.
The bill, adopted by parliament a year ago, also makes it a requirement to obtain special permission to import books in the Russian language from third countries.
Mr Zelenskyy’s office said on Twitter that the law would “strengthen the protection of the Ukrainian cultural and information space from anti-Ukrainian Russian propaganda”.
Ukraine has been carrying out what it describes as a “de-Russification” process, saying it is necessary to undo centuries of policies it considers were aimed at crushing the Ukrainian identity.
Culture minister Oleksandr Tkachenko thanked the president for signing the bill.
“The adoption of this draft law will protect the Ukrainian book publishing and distribution sector from the destructive influence of the ‘Russian world’,” he said on Telegram.
Russia’s Supreme Court has rejected a lawsuit by opposition politician Alexei Navalny contesting prison regulations that allow officials to deprive him of stationery and pens.
Mr Navalny is serving a nine-year sentence for fraud and contempt of court in a maximum security penal colony in Melekhovo 150 miles east of Moscow.
In the lawsuit considered by the Supreme Court, Mr Navalny complained that prison officials in the restricted housing unit, where he is held in isolation, no longer gave him a pen and paper.
“Some are being given a pen and paper for an hour. In some places, for 15 minutes, and a convict needs a week to finish a letter. In my case, the time for writing materials was removed from my schedule entirely. How come? The prison chief decided so, that’s how,” Mr Navalny wrote in a social media post on the eve of the hearing.
The complaint is one of many the 47-year-old politician has filed against prison officials, alleging multiple violations of his rights as a convict.
All of his lawsuits and petitions have been rejected by Russian courts.
During the hearing, Russian authorities argued that there was nothing wrong with prison regulations and that Mr Navalny should be given a pen and paper whenever he asked for them, if he was not required to do something else at that time.
Mr Navalny’s arguments that it does not work that way in his prison were brushed off, and the court quashed his lawsuit.
Ukraine is carrying out the largest campaign of repairs in modern history to its power system to prepare for another winter of possible Russian air strikes, its energy minister said today.
Missile and drone attacks on energy infrastructure following Russia’s full-scale invasion last year caused sweeping blackouts and water outages for millions of Ukrainians during the winter.
“The most extensive repair campaign in the history of energy facilities is currently under way in Ukraine,” energy minister German Galushchenko was quoted as saying by his ministry on Telegram.
“Power generation and distribution facilities are being restored, and work is under way to strengthen the power system’s resilience to military challenges.”
Ukraine has nearly doubled electricity tariffs for consumers since 1 June to find funds to prepare for winter, when energy consumption is typically at its highest.
About 43% of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has been damaged in air strikes, state-owned power distributor Ukrenergo estimates.
Some 70% of its substations have been attacked at least twice, it says.
The slower than expected pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensive operations is not emblematic of the country’s broader offensive potential, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
In its latest update on the conflict, the think-tank said Ukrainian forces are likely successfully setting conditions for a future main effort, despite initial setbacks.
“Ukrainian officials have long signalled that the Ukrainian counteroffensive would be a series of gradual and sequential offensive actions, and have more recently offered the observation that currently ongoing operations do not represent the main thrust of Ukraine’s counteroffensive planning,” the update read.
Ukrainian deputy defence minister Hanna Malyar said on 20 June that it is not useful to gauge the success of military actions based “solely by kilometres or the number of liberated settlements.”
Her statement echoes Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s observation that war is not a “Hollywood movie” that will deliver immediate and tangible results.
We’ve been putting your questions on the Ukraine war to our senior correspondents and experts.
Today’s question comes from Mike Davison, who asks if there is any chance China encouraged the invasion of Ukraine, knowing how it would destabilise the Western economies, weaken Vladimir Putin and ultimately leave China as the real geopolitical, economic and military winner.
Our international affairs editor Dominic Waghorn has this to say…
It’s an intriguing theory.
The war has certainly benefited China up to a point. It has made Russia beholden to it in a deeply imbalanced relationship.
As one Russian put to me in Moscow last year Russia is now China’s bitch.
China now has an endless supply of cheap Russian energy to draw on and a captive market for its goods. And the battlefields of Ukraine are a gold mine of new data for China’s military planners to learn from.
Having said that, the Chinese leadership is pragmatic and cautious. It would have been out of character to encourage anything as unpredictable as this invasion. Beijing would have feared the impact on the global economy on its own, especially given its frailty in the wake of the COVID pandemic.
And the conflict has strengthened China’s rivals in the West. After the turmoil of the Trump years there were real doubts about the state and unity of the Western alliance.
This war has reversed all that, strengthening its resolve and that spells trouble for China and its plans to take Taiwan.
What’s clear is Xi Jinping either had the wool pulled over his eyes by Vladimir Putin or did not do enough to restrain him over Ukraine, possibly tempted to see how the conflict might turn out.
But the idea he actively worked to make all this happen is probably a conspiracy theory too far.
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