WAR IN UKRAINE: June 5, 2022
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS: Day 102
A key advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has described the war in Ukraine as a “slow and boring war.” Slow because the front is quite limited. Boring because “people are looking elsewhere.” He said with winter coming, Russia will try to create as much destabilization as possible with energy.
Although the Zelensky administration hasn’t released official death figures of Ukrainian service members, if one goes by the president’s estimate of 100 deaths-a-day, that adds up to more than 10,000. However far less than the estimated 25,000 or more deaths on the Russian side.
Ukraine’s largest all-wooden church goes up in flames due to a Russian missile strike. The Skete of All Saints of the Svyatogorsk Lavra in the Donetsk region has been destroyed, according to Ukrainian Member of Parliament Oleksiy Govcharenko. Countless historic sites in Ukraine have been totally destroyed or damaged and Kyiv has appealed to the United Nations for intervention.
For a Ukrainian woman from Popasna and her family, insult was added to injury when they saw a Reuters photograph of a Russian tank bearing the Latin letter 'Z,' which has become the Russian government’s symbol for its so-called “special military operation in Ukraine, that was taken in Popasna on May 26. More specifically, it was the box, bed linens, and other items strapped to the top of the tank that caught their attention in the photograph, which they could tell had been taken about a five-minute drive from their home. More in this RFE/RL story here
