WAR IN UKRAINE: July 11, 2022

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS: Day 140

  • At least 15 people were killed and 24 feared buried after Russian missiles hit a city in eastern Ukraine, destroying part of a five-storey apartment building, officials said on Sunday. Photos and a video of what appeared to be the aftermath of the attack in Chasiv Yar in the Donetsk province showed grim-faced rescuers atop a huge pile of rubble.

  • U.S. President Joe Biden to negotiate providing Ukraine with Soviet-made weapons during trip to Middle East. The New York Times reports that Biden will ask countries to provide Ukraine with the remaining stocks of Soviet-made weapons, with which “Ukrainians are more familiar.”

  • The Ukrainian government on Sunday expressed “deep disappointment” at Canada’s decision to send back repaired Russian-owned gas turbines that had been stranded in Montreal because of sanctions against Moscow, warning the move would embolden Russia to keep using energy as a weapon, the Globe and Mail reports. “This dangerous precedent violates international solidarity, goes against the principle of the rule of law and will have only one consequence: it will strengthen Moscow’s sense of impunity,” the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ukrainian Ministry of Energy said.

  • Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Saturday that he had dismissed several of Kyiv's senior envoys abroad, including the country's outspoken ambassador to Germany. Zelenskiy announced the sacking of Ukraine's ambassadors to Germany, India, the Czech Republic, Norway and Hungary and said new candidates were being readied for the positions. “This rotation is a normal part of diplomatic practice," he said in a statement - Reuters

  • Russian forces broke into a restricted area of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, according to operator Energoatom. “The Russian military forcibly forced the management of the station to allow a well-known Russian blogger-propagandist with a representative of Rosatom and accompanied by armed soldiers to the block control panel of one of the power units of the nuclear plant and to other premises with limited access. There they plan to organize filming and force Ukrainian personnel to participate in propaganda interviews," the company reported as quoted by Ukrainian Channel 5 TV.


Required reading…

A missile recently slammed into the roof of the Amstor shopping centre in the Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk, killing dozens. As the death toll mounted, the contradictory and confusing nature of Russian officials' denials and deflections became all too clear — and an open-source fact check showed that they didn't square with the evidence.

As with other claims made by Russia, such as in Bucha and Kramotorsk earlier in the war, the Russian claims - such as the mall was a storage depot for weapons - do not appear to be supported by the available open source evidence and videos from the scene.

The latest from Bellingcat investigation here