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Morning Headlines
Reuters: Ukraine said on Monday its forces had gained some ground along eastern and southern fronts in the past week in heavy fighting with Russian troops, reclaiming 37.4 square kilometres (14.4 square miles) of territory.
Reuters: The European Union is considering a proposal for Russian Agricultural Bank to set up a subsidiary to reconnect to the global financial network as a sop to Moscow, the Financial Times said on Monday. With the bank, also known as Rosselkhozbank, under sanctions, the move aims to safeguard the Black Sea grain deal that lets Ukraine export food to global markets, the newspaper said.
BBC News: ‘A Ukrainian soldier drags himself through the long grass, one leg trailing limply behind him. Seconds later, a flash of bright orange and a cloud of white smoke mark the spot, just a few metres away, where yet another land mine has been triggered.’
Reuters: Russia has brought some 700,000 children from the conflict zones in Ukraine into Russian territory, Grigory Karasin, head of the international committee in the Federation Council, Russia's upper house of parliament, said late on Sunday.
ISW: Putin continues to face the choice of either siding with the Russian Ministry of Defense to defend its weakened reputation or maintaining his support among pro-war ultranationalist milbloggers and their patronage networks.
UK Ministry of Defence: With a pre-war population of 44 million, a quarter of Ukrainians remain forced from their homes as a result of Russia’s invasion.
02.07.2023
Reuters: Ukrainian forces are resisting a Russian onslaught in eastern areas of the front and face difficulties in the northeast, but are making progress near the shattered city of Bakhmut and in the south, the deputy defence minister said on Sunday.
WSJ Exclusive: In the wake of a revolt against Russia, President Vladimir Putin faces a new test—trying to take control of the Wagner Group’s corporate empire.
The Guardian: Andrei Kelin, the Russian ambassador, spoke at the event where he sought to justify his country’s bloody invasion of Ukraine, while those attending included the UK’s Conservative Lord Balfe and cross-bencher Lord Skidelsky.
AFP: Energy giants TotalEnergies and Shell on Sunday defended activities linked to Russia after a critical report into their trading in natural gas despite the war in Ukraine.
The White House: Biden is scheduled to be in Vilnius for the important NATO gathering on July 11-12 -- where the Ukraine war will be high on the agenda for alliance members.
BBC News: A week on from the dramatic mutiny by Wagner forces, residents in Rostov-on-Don - the city the mercenary troops seized - have been reflecting on the events that rocked Russia.
CNN: On June 6, Ukraine suffered an environmental catastrophe. The collapse of the Kakhovka dam in the south of the country sent water thundering downstream, killing more than 100 people according to Ukrainian officials. It wiped out villages, flooded farmland and nature reserves, and swept up pollutants like oil and agricultural chemicals as it made its destructive path towards the Black Sea.
Reuters: Poland will send 500 police officers to its border with Belarus, Minister of Interior Mariusz Kaminski said on Sunday. The Polish Border Guard on Sunday said that 187 people tried to cross into Poland from Belarus illegally on Saturday.
Reuters: Prigozhin's media holding group is to shut down, the director of one of its outlets said, highlighting the mercenary chief's worsening fortunes a week after the collapse of a brief mutiny staged by his Wagner Group fighters.
ISW: Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted counteroffensive operations in at least four sectors of the frontline on July 1. Russian forces are likely responding to Ukrainian operations around Bakhmut by pulling forces from elsewhere in Ukraine.
Reuters: The ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) is working on a bill that would temporarily ban the travel of close relatives of high-ranking officials to "unfriendly countries," the RIA state news agency reported on Sunday.
Reuters: Russia launched an overnight drone attack on Kyiv after a 12-day break, a Ukrainian military official said on Sunday, with air defence systems preliminarily destroying all targets on their approach.
01.07.2023
CNN: The most intense battles on the front line continue to be in areas within the cities of Bakhmut and Marinka in eastern Ukraine, the Ukrainian military said Saturday.
AFP: Forty diplomats and Russian embassy staff in Bucharest were set to leave Romania on Saturday following a request from the government, with ties worsening between the two countries since Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
NY Times: As Belarus has ratcheted up its messaging about plans to offer refuge — and possibly work — to Wagner group mercenaries after a failed rebellion in Russia, Ukrainian forces say they are ready for any potential threat from their neighbor to the north.
The Guardian: Putin’s efforts to end a coup by the Wagner group may have made it easier for an international court to prosecute him, and the Russian state, for war crimes committed by the mercenary fighters, according to experts in international law.
Reuters: U.S. CIA Director William Burns said on Saturday that the armed mutiny by mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was a challenge to the Russian state that had shown the corrosive effect of President Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine.
AFP: Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said Saturday that his visit to Kyiv on the first day of Spain's EU presidency showed the bloc's "unequivocal" commitment to Ukraine's bid to join the 27-nation bloc.
Reuters: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned on Saturday that a "serious threat" remained at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and said that Russia was "technically ready" to provoke a localized explosion at the facility.
Novaya-Europe: CIA Director and former US Ambassador to Russia William Burns went on a secret trip to Ukraine at the end of June to discuss plans according to which cease-fire negotiations with Russia could be reopened by the end of the year, The Washington Post reports, citing officials familiar with the matter.
Reuters: Japan's defence ministry said late on Friday it had spotted two Russian Navy ships in the waters near Taiwan and Japan's Okinawa islands in the previous four days, following a similar announcement this week from Taiwan. Taiwan's defence ministry said on Tuesday it had spotted two Russian frigates off its eastern coast and send aircraft and ships to keep watch.
Reuters: Ukraine has been publicly cautious in counting gains in a counteroffensive it launched this month to reclaim territory occupied by Russian forces, and on Friday its president and a U.S. general acknowledged that progress is measured in blood.
30.06.2023
WSJ Exclusive: CIA Director William Burns quietly reached out to his Russian counterpart in the aftermath of a failed mutiny by Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, delivering a message that the U.S. had no involvement in Russia’s internal chaos, officials familiar with the matter said.
Bloomberg: Wagner mercenary group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, who staged an unsuccessful mutiny to replace Russia’s military leadership, is winding down his Russian media operations, Izvestia newspaper reported, citing an unidentified source.
The Defense Post: Kazakhstan has announced it had uncovered online efforts to recruit its citizens in the Kremlin-friendly Central Asian country to fight alongside Russian forces in Ukraine.
The Hill: Russia is actively blocking ports and maritime commerce to cripple Ukraine’s economy and violate its right to free trade as a sovereign nation. Russia is using a humanitarian grain deal as a new form of “piracy,” one that extends beyond the looting of Ukraine’s assets and the pillaging of their cultural institutions.
Al-Monitor: A base housing units of Russia’s paramilitary Wagner group in eastern Libya was the target of a drone strike overnight on Friday, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
DW: President Vladmir Putin has said Russian security forces were united in their response to the uprising by the Wagner Group. How was it, then, that fighters came within striking distance of Moscow?
Reuters: President Volodymyr Zelenskiy ordered top military commanders on Friday to strengthen Ukraine's northern military sector following the arrival of Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin in Belarus.
Reuters Exclusive: Ukrainian prosecutors on Friday charged a Russian politician and two suspected Ukrainian collaborators with war crimes over the alleged deportation of dozens of orphans from the formerly-occupied southern city of Kherson, some of them as young as one.
CNN Exclusive: Documents shared exclusively with CNN suggest that Russian Gen. Sergey Surovikin was a secret VIP member of the Wagner private military company. The documents, obtained by the Russian investigative Dossier Center, showed that Surovikin had a personal registration number with Wagner.
The Guardian: Russia is reducing its presence at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate (GUR) has claimed, with staff told to relocate to Crimea and military patrols scaled back.
Bloomberg: EU leaders back windfall tax on profits generated by frozen Russian central bank assets to aid Ukraine’s reconstruction.
AFP: Poland has arrested a Russian hockey player suspected of having spied for Moscow while playing for a club in the EU country, the government said on Friday.
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