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Morning Headlines
Reuters: Ukrainian troops pressed on with their campaign to recapture Russian-held areas in the southeast on Sunday as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in broadcast comments that his country's forces had "taken the initiative" after an earlier slowdown.
BBC News: Nato is just hours away from its high-profile annual summit - a stress test for the alliance, with Russian President Vladimir Putin watching intently from the sidelines.
Reuters: U.S. President Joe Biden arrived in Britain on Sunday, starting a three-nation trip that will be dominated by a NATO summit in Lithuania aimed at showing solidarity with Ukraine in its fight against Russia while not yet accepting Kyiv as a member of the alliance.
Meduza: Roughly 47,000. That is how many Russian soldiers have died so far in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to a joint study by journalists at Meduza and Mediazona and Tubingen University statistician Dmitry Kobak.
ISW continues to assess that the current pace of the Ukrainian counteroffensive is reflective of a deliberate effort to conserve Ukrainian combat power and attrit Russian manpower and equipment at the cost of slower territorial advances.
UK Ministry of Defence: Russia is almost certainly struggling with a crisis of combat medical provision, after suffering an average of around 400 casualties a day for 17 months. Very slow casualty evacuation, combined with the inappropriate use of the crude in-service Russian combat tourniquet, is reportedly a leading cause of preventable fatalities and amputations.
Bloomberg: Russia's invasion of Ukraine is forcing the biggest rethink of Europe's defense industry since the end of the cold war.
09.07.2023
CNN Exclusive: President Joe Biden told CNN in an exclusive interview that Ukraine is not yet ready for NATO membership, saying that Russia’s war in Ukraine needs to end before the alliance can consider adding Kyiv to its ranks.
POLITICO: A small group of Western allies are engaged in “advanced” and “frantic, last-minute” negotiations to finalize a security assurance declaration for Ukraine ahead of this week’s NATO summit in Lithuania, according to four officials familiar with the talks.
AFP: Turkish President Erdogan will meet US counterpart Joe Biden on the sidelines of the upcoming NATO summit in Lithuania, the Turkish presidency said Sunday. The talks will focus on "Ukraine's position in NATO, Sweden's NATO membership, and the delivery of F-16" fighter jets, which Turkey hopes to secure from the United States, Erdogan's office said.
The Economist: Sappers risk their lives to win Ukraine back, inch by inch. Demining by hand, combat engineers try to break through Russian lines.
WSJ Exclusive: The Kremlin’s push to take control of Wagner is triggering security fears in parts of the Middle East and Africa, despite the group’s assurances that Russia’s role in these regions will be unaffected.
Reuters: Russian air defence systems shot down four missiles on Sunday, Russian officials said, one over the annexed Crimean peninsula and three over Russia's Rostov and Bryansk regions that border Ukraine.
The Guardian: Known as the ‘people’s missile’, the bomb costs about £2,300 to build and can be transported in a car boot.
Reuters: The Ukrainian and Polish presidents marked the anniversary of massacres of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists during World War Two on Sunday, killings that have been a source of tension between the allies.
BBC Verify: False and misleading posts about the Ukraine conflict continue to go viral on major social media platforms, as Russia's invasion of the country extends beyond 500 days. Some of the most widely shared examples can be found on Twitter, posted by subscribers with a blue tick, who pay for their content to be promoted to other users.
The Telegraph: Germany is set to insist on delaying Ukraine’s accession to Nato over fears the move could take the alliance to war with Russia.
WSJ: Outgunned, outmanned and facing a deeply entrenched enemy, Ukrainian troops are attempting one of the most daunting operations a military can undertake.
08.07.2023
Reuters: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy returned from a visit to Turkey on Saturday, bringing home five former commanders of Ukraine's garrison in Mariupol despite a prisoner exchange last year under which the men were meant to remain in Turkey. Russia immediately denounced the release of the men. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Turkey had violated the prisoner exchange terms and had failed to inform Moscow.
Reuters: Poland began moving over 1,000 troops to the east of the country on Saturday, the defence minister said, amid rising concern in the NATO-member that the presence of Wagner Group fighters in Belarus could lead to increased tension on its border.
The Telegraph: The Kremlin will soon begin restricting Russians’ music playlists and tracking their taxi journeys in real time as it ramps up state surveillance two weeks after a failed rebellion.
The Guardian: The commander of the Freedom of Russia Legion says his fighters are planning another cross-border raid into Russia and are seeking to capitalise on disarray inside the Kremlin following the mutiny by Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Reuters: Ukraine's Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov welcomed the U.S. decision to send cluster bombs to Kyiv, saying it would help to de-occupy the Ukrainian territory but vowed that the munitions would be not used in Russia.
Reuters: Mercenary fighters of Yevgeny Prigozhin's Wagner group are preparing to move to Belarus under the terms of a deal that defused their mutiny against Russia's military leadership, a senior commander of the group was quoted as saying.
Reuters: NATO has turned Vilnius into a fortress defended by advanced weaponry to protect U.S. President Biden and other alliance leaders meeting next week only 32 km from Lithuania's razor-wire topped border fence with Russian ally Belarus. Sixteen NATO allies have sent a total of about 1,000 troops to safeguard the July 11-12 summit, which will take place only 151 km from Russia itself. Many are also providing advanced air defence systems which the Baltic states lack.
AFP: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has visited a tiny Black Sea island whose few defenders famously defied a Russian warship at the beginning of the invasion, as the conflict reaches its 500th day.
ISW: Ukrainian forces made tactically significant gains in the Bakhmut area and continued counteroffensive operations in at least three other sectors of the front on July 7. Russian forces have reportedly committed almost the entirety of the Russian Eastern Grouping of Forces to southern Ukraine.
UK Ministry of Defence: The Russian leadership almost certainly see it as politically unacceptable to concede Bakhmut, which has a symbolic weight as one of the few Russian gains in the last 12 months. However, there are highly likely few additional reserves to commit to the sector.
07.07.2023
Reuters: Ukraine's counter-offensive against Russian forces is going more slowly than some expected but it remains too early to draw conclusions about Kyiv's prospects for battlefield gains, a senior Pentagon official said on Friday.
AFP: Ukraine's proposed entrance into NATO will be discussed but not decided at the alliance's summit next week in Vilnius, the White House said Friday.
Reuters: More than 40 aviation leasing firms, locked in a battle with insurers over who should bear up to $10 billion in costs for 400 jets stuck in Russia, are urging the High Court to allow a reinsurance dispute to be heard in London, not Moscow. Lessors have not received any insurance payments for planes stranded following sanctions on Russia, and are suing insurers across several jurisdictions, including London.
POLITICO: Germany’s military spy agency is warning that Russia and China are boosting their espionage activities in the country. In a new report published Friday, Germany’s Military Counterintelligence Service said that it is of “prominent value” for Russia, hence why a “high number of Russian intelligence operatives” are deployed there.
Reuters Exclusive: As Wagner mercenaries advanced on Moscow in an attempted mutiny in late June, authorities in Syria and Russian military commanders there took a series of swift measures against local Wagner operatives to prevent the uprising spreading, according to six sources familiar with the matter.
Reuters: An adviser to the Belarus defence minister on Friday refused to confirm or deny whether Russian tactical nuclear weapons were stored at a facility at Osipovichi in central Belarus.
AP News: The United States and its Western allies clashed with Russia and Iran at the U.N. Security Council on Thursday over Tehran’s advancing uranium enrichment and its reported supply of combat drones to Moscow being used to attack Ukraine.
Bloomberg: The EU’s sanctions against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine will build over time and will have a growing long-term impact on its economy, according to an assessment.
Reuters: The EU will devote 500 million euros to boosting the production of ammunition for Ukraine and to replenish the stocks of EU member countries, it announced on Friday.
Critical Threats (CTP): Iranian diaspora media, citing Russian investigative sources, claimed on July 6 that Russia has paid Iran nearly 900 million US dollars for Iranian drone technology.
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