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Morning Headlines
Reuters: Russia said on Monday that its forces had thwarted a major Ukrainian offensive at five points along the front in the southern Ukrainian region of Donetsk and killed hundreds of pro-Kyiv troops.
Reuters: Two drones fell on a highway in Russia's Kaluga region that borders with the Moscow region to its north, with the local governor saying on Monday there was no detonation of explosives.
AP News: President Joe Biden is welcoming Denmark and Britain's prime ministers this week to Washington for talks that will focus heavily on what lays ahead in the war in Ukraine —including the recently-launched effort to train, and eventually equip, Ukraine with American-made F-16s fighter jets.
ISW: The dissonant Russian responses to and reporting about the limited raid in Belgorod Oblast continue to suggest that the Russian leadership has not yet decided how to react to these limited cross-border raids.
UK Ministry of Defence on Russia launching Iranian Shahed UAVs in May 2023: Russia has likely been attempting to locate and strike Ukrainian forces well behind the front line. However, it remains very ineffective at hitting such dynamic targets at range because of its poor targeting processes.
04.06.2023
Reuters: Russian police on Sunday arrested more than 100 people who had taken to the streets to mark the 47th birthday of Alexei Navalny, Russia's most prominent opposition leader, a protest monitoring group said.
Reuters: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Sunday said that Russia was using a network of suppliers to evade international sanctions designed to prevent it from making missiles and other weapons.
The Guardian: A pro-Ukraine group of Russian partisans has said it captured several soldiers during a cross-border raid into southern Russia and will hand them over to Ukrainian authorities.
POLITICO: Ukraine's deputy defense minister has told POLITICO his country is seeking to become a NATO member within a “very short” time after achieving military victory over Russia.
The Guardian: As Russia’s war in Ukraine has grown into an existential conflict for the Kremlin over the past 15 months, its search for internal enemies has intensified, with a sharp rise in treason cases that experts have equated to a “spymania”.
Reuters: Five drones were shot down and four were jammed and did not hit their targets in Dzhankoi in Crimea, a Russian-installed official in the peninsula that Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014 said on Sunday.
Reuters: Shelling by Ukrainian forces on Russia's Belgorod region continued overnight on Sunday after two people were killed the previous night and hundreds of children were evacuated away from the border, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said on Sunday.
RFE/RL: A 2-year-old child was killed in a Russian air strike on the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro, while air defenses in the capital of Kyiv repelled a wave of Russian drones and missiles, Ukrainian officials said on June 4.
ISW: Prigozhin’s apparent threat to undertake military operations, even defensive ones, on Russian territory without the permission of the Russian MoD is astonishing if it is anything other than flamboyant rhetoric.
Bloomberg: The Kremlin is reestablishing its diplomatic presence in Tripoli, while Russian mercenaries have access to oil facilities and military bases further east.
03.06.2023
The Telegraph: An investigation has found that Putin's KGB spy exploits are likely to have been exaggerated. German magazine Spiegel looked into the Russian leader’s past and discovered he was nothing more than a pen pusher.
NY Times: A car bomb killed at least one person on Friday night in Russian-occupied southern Ukraine, according to Ukrainian and Russian officials, highlighting the war’s reach far beyond the front lines as Ukrainian partisans aim to undermine their occupiers.
AP News: The number of political prisoners in Russia is growing, and their life behind bars is anything but easy. AP reporter Dasha Litvinova interviewed some of them and their loved ones to get a glimpse of what it’s like.
Reuters: Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin said on Saturday that Kremlin factions were destroying the state by trying to sow discord between him and Chechen fighters. That row had now been settled but infighting in the Kremlin had opened a Pandora's Box of rifts, he said.
Interfax-Ukraine: There might be conflicts or military confrontations inside the aggressor country as a result of the successful efforts of the security and defense forces of Ukraine and the successful actions of the "insurgents", Spokesperson for the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Defense Ministry of Ukraine Andriy Yusov has said.
POLITICO: Slovakia has been a strong supporter of Kyiv throughout the war, but now a populist party led by controversial former Prime Minister Robert Fico is calling for an end to military support for Ukraine.
Reuters: Ukraine's plans for a counteroffensive against Russian occupation remain on track, its deputy defence minister told Reuters on Saturday, despite an "unprecedented" wave of missile and drone attacks across the country in recent weeks.
The forced deployment of once-elite Russian VDV troops to Bakhmut amid the withdrawal of Wagner mercenary forces means “the whole Russian force is likely to be less flexible in reacting to operational challenges”, the UK Ministry of Defence has said.
ISW: The Russian Ministry of Defense continues to respond disproportionately to limited raids into Russian territory, likely to project confidence and competence in its ability to respond to perceived threats.
BBC: The Ukrainian capital Kyiv has been repeatedly hit by missiles and drones over the past few weeks. Most of the attacks come at night.
02.06.2023
The Kyiv Independent: Wagner mercenary group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin accused "representatives of the Russian Defense Ministry" of placing mines along Wagner troops' exit routes from Bakhmut.
Reuters: A Russian-installed official in Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia region said on Friday that Ukrainian forces shelled the Russian-controlled port city of Berdyansk on the Sea of Azov and that nine people had been reported injured.
The Moscow Times: Refugees from Russian border regions fleeing intensifying cross-border shelling and Ukrainian-backed incursions in recent days expressed despair at their future and anger toward officials in interviews with The Moscow Times.
The Guardian: Ukrainian-backed Russian rebel groups have said they are still fighting inside Russia’s Belgorod region, despite Moscow’s claims on Thursday to have repelled the incursion.
Bloomberg: Ukraine is calling on the EU to stop a ban on exports of its crops to several Eastern European neighbors, arguing that the restrictions are a boon for Russia.
AFP: A top White House official on Friday offered to maintain current nuclear warhead limits with Russia, while making the case for putting rising power China at the center of future arms control efforts.
Reuters: Ukraine's ministry of renovation and infrastructure said on Thursday the U.N.-brokered Black Sea grain export deal had been halted again because Russia had blocked registration of ships to all Ukrainian ports.
Reuters: Russia's Black Sea port of Taman is poised to suspend exports of highly-explosive liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) because of concerns linked to drone attacks, three sources with knowledge of the situation told Reuters on Friday.
Reuters: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday warned against any peace initiatives that could help legitimize Russia's seizure of Ukrainian territory, saying a "just and durable" peace effort should address accountability and reconstruction.
WP: NATO must compel its member nations to grow their military spending if the alliance is to deter Russia effectively beyond the war in Ukraine and manage other threats to transatlantic security, British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said in an interview.
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