kyiv was targeted by Russian missiles for the first time in weeks on Sunday as fierce fighting continued in eastern Ukraine and leaders of the G7 countries met in Bavaria, with news sanctions against Russia.
The American Institute for the Study of War (ISW) observes “abnormal series of Russian strikes on rear areas”. He quotes the command of the Ukrainian Air Force according to which some 50 strikes were recorded on Saturday near kyiv, Khmelnytskyi, Lviv (west), Cherniguiv (north), Mykolaiv (south), Kharkiv (northeast) and in the Dnepropetrovsk region (center).
Russia thus recalls its ability to reach any point on Ukrainian territory, even if most of the operations take place in the east and south.
Here is an update on the situation on the ground on Sunday on the 123rd day of the war, based on information from AFP journalists on site, official Ukrainian and Russian statements, Western sources, analysts and organizations international.
The war in Kyiv
Four missiles hit a residential area near the center of kyiv on Sunday morning, according to AFP journalists. One person was found dead and four others had to be hospitalized, according to the mayor of the Ukrainian capital, Vitaly Klitschko.
“A body was found, six residents were injured, four of whom were hospitalized, including a seven-year-old girl,” he said, without giving details of the person who died. Four explosions were heard around 6:30 a.m.
It is about “intimidating the Ukrainians […] approaching the NATO summit”, an organization hated by Russia, he continued, a few days before the summit of the Atlantic Alliance, from June 28 to 30 in Madrid.
“Today civilians in Kyiv are being attacked while the G7 is meeting. (Russia) understands that there are no weapons that can scare us, it wants the whole world to be scared. Be afraid or act now. The choice is yours! tweeted Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov.
The Artyom arms factory, “as a military infrastructure, was the target”, for its part assured the Russian Ministry of Defense, saying that the damage to a nearby building was due to an anti-aircraft missile. .
“A missile was shot down by the anti-aircraft defense in the kyiv region, the debris fell on a village,” said the governor of the kyiv region, Oleksiï Kouleba.
The eastern lock
Russian forces completely captured the strategic city of Severodonetsk and entered the neighboring city of Lysychansk, an important step towards conquering the entire Donbass mining basin.
“However, this is only one of the challenges that Russia will have to meet to occupy the whole of the region”, estimates the British Ministry of Defence, which underlines the Russian desire to “advance on the major center of Kramatorsk and to secure the supply routes” of the city of Donetsk.
The Russian military also advanced east of the city of Bakhmout and continued its offensives southeast of Izium, towards Sloviansk, according to the ISW.
North and West
The Russian Defense Ministry said it struck three military training centers in the north and west with “high-precision weapons of the Russian Aerospace Forces and Kalibr (cruise) missiles”. Among the targets is a Ukrainian military training center in the Starytchi district, in the Lviv region, about thirty kilometers from the Polish border.
These regions are not the scene of any ground combat.
Ban Russian Gold
The great powers of the G7, which seek to intensify the pressure on Moscow after four months of war in Ukraine, announced on the first day of their summit their intention to ban imports of Russian gold, cut off from the crucial London market.
“Together, the G7 will announce that we will ban Russian gold, a major source of exports, which will deprive Russia of billions of dollars,” tweeted US President Joe Biden, who was meeting his French counterparts in Bavaria. , the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan, while the risk of a form of fatigue in the support provided to kyiv appears.
Vladimir Putin hoped that “one way or another, NATO and the G7 will split. But we haven’t and we won’t,” Biden said.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has warned French President Emmanuel Macron against the temptation of a negotiated solution “now” at the risk of prolonging “global instability”, according to Downing Street. The two leaders “agreed […] that it was possible to reverse the course of the war”.
Civilian and military casualties
There is no overall assessment of the civilian victims of the conflict, which is certainly very heavy. According to the UN, 4,500 civilians have been killed and 5,500 injured as of June 15. But “the figure is probably much higher,” she adds.
Militarily, Western security sources speak of 15,000 to 20,000 Russian soldiers killed. Ukrainian forces are losing around 100 men every day, according to kyiv. No independent statistics are available.
A third of displaced or refugee Ukrainians
More than seven million Ukrainians are internally displaced, according to the UN. Added to this are eight million who have fled abroad, including a very large proportion to Poland. Before the Russian invasion, Ukraine had 37 million inhabitants in the territory controlled by kyiv, amputated in particular from the Crimea annexed by Moscow in 2014.