WAR IN UKRAINE: June 30, 2023
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS: Day 492
One of the Russian warplanes reportedly shot down during the Wagner rebellion was a “special mission aircraft” with a key role in the war in Ukraine. It is understood that on Saturday air defence forces of the Wagner group shot down an Ilyushin Il-22M aircraft, part of a relatively small fleet of 12 such planes “heavily utilised for both airborne command and control, and radio relay tasks”, the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) has said. Footage on social media showed an aircraft, thought to be the Ilyushin, falling from the sky in flames, somewhere near the city of Voronezh, reportedly killing all ten occupants. A further five military helicopters, including Ka-52 “Alligator” gunships, were also said to have been shot down, as the Wagner Group made its extraordinary dash north towards Moscow - Telegraph
The Wagner Group is still recruiting fighters across Russia, days after staging a mutiny that led Vladimir Putin to raise fears of civil war. Using a Russian phone number, we called more than a dozen recruitment centres saying, if asked, that we were inquiring on behalf of a brother. All those who replied confirmed that it was business as usual. From Kaliningrad in the west to Krasnodar in the south, no-one believed the group was being disbanded - BBC
In the city of Kramatorsk, Ukrainian rescuers pulled another body from the rubble of a restaurant and shopping center targeted by a Russian missile strike, taking the death toll in the June 27 attack to 12.
Russian troops struck a relief center in Kherson on June 29, killing two civilians and injuring two more, according to Kherson Oblast Governor Oleksandr Prokudin. The attack occurred when residents came to the place, known as the "invincibility center," to receive humanitarian aid, Prokudin said. According to the Prosecutor General's Office, warehouses and other civilian infrastructure facilities were damaged in the attack - Kyiv Independent
A satellite communications system serving the Russian military was knocked offline by a cyberattack late Wednesday and remained mostly down on Thursday, in an incident reminiscent of an attack on a similar system used by Ukraine at the start of the war between the countries. Dozor-Teleport, the satellite system’s operator, switched some users to terrestrial networks during the outage, according to JD Work, a cyberspace professor at the National Defense University. Analyst Doug Madory of Kentik, which monitors online traffic, said one network was taken over by Dozor’s parent company, Amtel-Svyaz, while three others remained down. The company did not release a statement on what had gone wrong. At least two groups claimed responsibility for the attack, one describing itself as a hacktivist organization and the other as part of the Wagner Group, the mercenaries who mutinied last week and marched most of the way to Moscow. The hackers claimed to have sent malicious software to the satellite terminals, setting off a scramble among security experts to obtain a terminal for testing - Washington Post