Russia-Ukraine updates: ‘Heavy fighting’ towards Bakhmut – Kyiv

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, has said.

“In recent years, 700,000 children have found refuge with us, fleeing the bombing and shelling from the conflict areas in Ukraine,” Karasin wrote on his Telegram messaging channel.

Moscow says its programme of bringing children from Ukraine into Russian territory is to protect orphans and children abandoned in conflict zones.

Ukraine and the United States say children have been illegally deported and forcibly removed from their homes.

The US ambassador to Russia, Lynne Tracy, has met jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich at Lefortovo Prison in Moscow, in the second such visit since his pre-trial detention in March on espionage charges.

“Ambassador Tracy reports that Mr Gershkovich is in good health and remains strong, despite his circumstances,” a State Department spokesperson said. “We expect Russian authorities to provide continued consular access.”

Russia has said Gershkovich was caught trying to obtain military secrets while on a trip to the Russian city of Yekaterinburg but has provided no details supporting that assertion. The Wall Street Journal denies the allegations.

The Ukraine Solidarity Project (USP) has added British consumer goods giant Unilever to its list of sponsors of war, after the company failed to act on its announced decision to quit the Russian market over Moscow’s war in Ukraine.

Unilever, which owns hundreds of internationally-known brands, including Dove, Rexona, Lipton, and Domestos, remained in Russia and increased its profits in the country by 24.9 percent last year, according to Ukraine’s National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NAZK).

Protesters held a billboard with a spoof Dove advertisement outside the Unilever HQ in London.

Unilever said it would continue to supply everyday food and hygiene products made in Russia to people in the country.

Giant poster outside @Unilever HQ ✔️
300 leaflets to staff and passers-by✔️
Staff taking photos on their way in ✔️
Unilever designated sponsor of war ✔️

Now @Unilever just needs to do the right thing and get out of Russia ASAP. pic.twitter.com/fa64YMtEys

— Ukraine Solidarity Project (@SolidarityUKR) July 3, 2023

A Russian drone attack killed at least two people and injured 19 in the northern Ukrainian city of Sumy, prompting President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to call for a major upgrade of anti-aircraft defences.

The Sumy regional administration said on the messaging app Telegram that an official building and two residential buildings were also damaged in the attack, carried out with four drones.

“Unfortunately, our country does not yet have a sufficient number of high-quality air defence systems to protect our entire territory and shoot down all enemy targets,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address.

“We will do everything possible and impossible to make our air defences the strongest,” he said, adding that Ukraine needed to protect its territory and “in [the] future become the basis of a European air shield”.

Turkey will not lift its opposition to Sweden joining NATO unless the Nordic country stops harbouring groups Ankara considers to be terrorists, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said.

“Everyone should acknowledge that they cannot form a friendship with Turkey by allowing terrorists to demonstrate in the most central squares of their cities,” he said.

In recent months, demonstrators in Stockholm waved flags showing support for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is also deemed a “terrorist” group by Turkey’s Western allies, including Sweden.

“Our position, expectations and promises that were made have been all clear. At the moment, we defend the same principles that we defended last year,” Erdogan said.

The European Union is considering a proposal for the Russian Agricultural Bank to set up a subsidiary to reconnect to the global financial network, the Financial Times has reported.

With the bank under sanctions, the move aims to safeguard the Black Sea grain deal that allows Ukraine to export food to global markets, the newspaper said.

The United Nations declined to comment on the FT report. UN spokesperson Farhan Haq told reporters that UN officials had been in touch with “a number of nations, including European nations, to find creative ways in which exports of food and fertiliser from the Russian Federation could be could be expedited”.

Zelenskyy has called on the Georgian government to transfer former President of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili, imprisoned for more than a year, to a clinic outside of the country.

Saakashvili is a Ukrainian citizen who served as the head of Zelenskyy’s Executive Committee for Reform. He was arrested in 2021 after returning to Georgia and jailed on what he said were trumped-up charges of abuse of office and embezzlement. His health deteriorated severely following two hunger strikes.

Zelenskyy said Saakashvili’s prolonged detention amounted to a death sentence. “No government in Europe has the right to execute people, life is a basic European value,” he said.

He added that Kyiv had summoned the Georgian ambassador to Ukraine to express “our strong protest” and ask him to leave Ukraine within 48 hours to “hold consultations with his capital”.

Right now, Russia is killing Ukrainian citizen Mykhailo Saakashvili at the hands of the Georgian authorities.

We have repeatedly called on the official Tbilisi to stop this abuse and agree on Saakashvili's return to Ukraine. Our partners, in coordination with Ukraine, have also… pic.twitter.com/Gzvl4zJPR1

— Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) July 3, 2023

Zelenskyy and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz have called for the extension of a deal allowing the safe export of grain and fertilisers from three Ukrainian Black Sea ports, an official said.

The two agreed to support the deal’s extension during a phone conversation, Scholz’s spokesperson said.

The Kremlin has said that Moscow is pessimistic about the prospects of renewing the deal, set to expire on July 18, because no progress has been made in implementing accompanying agreements that pertain to Russian exports.

Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant has been reconnected to its only available backup power line four months after it was lost, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has said.

“While the reconnection of the backup power line is positive, the plant’s external power situation remains highly vulnerable, underlining the precarious nuclear safety and security situation at the site,” IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi said.

Europe’s largest nuclear facility had been relying on a single main 750 kV line for the external electricity it needs for reactor cooling and other essential nuclear safety and security functions. It had four 750 kV lines before the conflict began in February 2022.

The plant’s backup connection was cut on March 1 due to damage sustained on the other side of the Dnipro River and restored during the evening of July 1. Work to reconnect the power line had been hampered by the difficult security situation in the southern region.

Ukraine’s #Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant has been reconnected to its only available back-up power line 4 months after it was lost but the site’s power situation remains extremely fragile during the ongoing military conflict DG @rafaelmgrossi said today. https://t.co/fILRvDyFFS pic.twitter.com/dPL4J5dWow

— IAEA – International Atomic Energy Agency ⚛️ (@iaeaorg) July 3, 2023

The EU’s top official has promised to leave “no stone unturned” when it comes to making Russian President Vladimir Putin accountable for the war against Ukraine.

“We will leave no stone unturned to hold Putin and his henchmen accountable,” said EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in a statement marking the opening of a centre for the prosecution of Russian aggression in Ukraine.

“The new international prosecution centre will play a key role in making sure that the perpetrators are brought to justice,” she said.

The centre is located at the EU justice agency Eurojust in The Hague.

In an interview with CNN taped over the weekend, Zelenskyy said Ukraine’s ultimate goal is to liberate Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014.

“We cannot imagine Ukraine without Crimea. And while Crimea is under the Russian occupation, it means only one thing: The war is not over yet,” he said.

Zelenskyy also said Putin’s reaction to the Wagner rebellion “was weak” and added that “all that vertical power he [Putin] used to have is just crumbling down.”

The family of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny has filed a class-action lawsuit against the penal colony where he is being held over its refusal to let them visit him.

“The whole Navalny family, including my parents, Yulia, Dasha and Zakhar, filed a class action lawsuit today and are determined to go all the way to the Constitutional Court,” the Putin critic said in a statement on his Twitter channel, which is controlled by his lawyers and allies.

“I am a convict, and they keep reminding me that I am ‘just like everyone else.’ And yet, I have had 0 (zero) visits over the past year. 0 (zero) long visits, 0 (zero) short visits, and 2 (two) phone calls 11 months ago,” he added.

Navalny has filed numerous complaints against the penal colony since his imprisonment, all of which have been rejected so far.

1/12 Who do you think is in this picture?

These are the plaintiffs. The whole Navalny family, including my parents, Yulia, Dasha and Zakhar, filed a class action lawsuit today and are determined to go all the way to the Constitutional Court. pic.twitter.com/Qpyc5yZdKG

— Alexey Navalny (@navalny) July 3, 2023

Lynne Tracy, the US ambassador to Russia, has been granted access to meet jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich after repeated requests to the Kremlin from Washington, the newspaper reports.

The visit is the second time the journalist has been given consular access since he was arrested in Russia in March and charged with espionage.

The US Department of State has formally designated Gershkovich as “wrongfully detained” and the administration of President Joe Biden has dismissed the charges against him as “ridiculous”.

Ukrainians and writers across the world have posted tributes on social media to Amelina for her work and bravery.

The Ukrainian war crimes researcher and novelist died from injuries sustained in Tuesday’s missile attack on the city of Kramatorsk, located in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.

When Victoria Amelina spoke at @UCLSSEES in April, she'd just written a poem about her experiences talking to women and documenting Russian war crimes in de-occupied areas. Here's a video of her reading the original; my translation is below. So painful to listen to this now. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/aYFOEKzmyX

— Uilleam Blacker 🇺🇦 (@BlackerUilleam) July 3, 2023

I’ll remember Victoria Amelina wearing a t-shirt “book is my superpower” in front of quiet children in Sloviansk and trying to make them smile. She managed to, of course.

Her life was a gift. Russians killed a writer, a war crimes researcher, a great soulhttps://t.co/bLD6rYRShA pic.twitter.com/ecS1gINP4T

— Dr Sasha Dovzhyk (@sasha_weirdsley) July 3, 2023

War Diary Day 494
Viktoria Amelina: one of life's great story-tellers… @vamelina pic.twitter.com/8idgC7AtLX

— John Sweeney (@johnsweeneyroar) July 3, 2023

Russian shelling in a village near Stanislav in southern Ukraine’s Kherson region has injured three people, according to the regional prosecutor’s office.

“On July 3 around 1:30pm [10:30 GMT], the Russian military fired artillery at a village in the Stanislav community of the Kherson region. Three local residents were injured, two of them were hospitalised,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement on its Telegram channel.

Russia’s top election official, Ella Panfilova, says that if the situation in Kremlin-controlled areas of Ukraine worsens due to the war, then local elections scheduled for September 6 could be cancelled.

“If unforeseen circumstances arise – in some areas the situation may deteriorate dramatically – and we see that there is a serious danger to the life and health of residents, then we have the right to postpone these elections,” Panfilova told Putin at a meeting in the Kremlin.

“We will certainly use this right if there are serious reasons for it,” she said.

Putin replied: “Understood.”

Russia controls just under one-fifth of Ukraine. Those territories consist of Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, and parts of four other southeastern regions that Russian troops have taken control of since Moscow’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Hungary will ask the EU for a one-year extension of an exemption from Russian sanctions that allows refiner Slovnaft, part of the Hungarian energy group MOL, to export products refined from Russian oil to the Czech Republic.

After a meeting with Slovakia’s foreign minister, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said MOL needs one more year to complete investment at its Slovak refinery, Slovnaft, which would allow a further shift to non-Russian crude.

Objects appearing to be mines have been found at a customs office dealing with post in Moscow, Russia’s TASS news agency reports.

The suspected mines were found in a mailed parcel, it said.

There are no confirmations on whether the objects have links to the war in Ukraine.