WAR IN UKRAINE: July 3, 2022
The modern reality for Ukrainian children. From h_Sal rocks on Instagram
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS: Day 133
Russia continues to focus on Lysychansk, amassing troops and equipment in a bid to capture the last major city in the Luhansk region still under Kyiv’s control. Pro-Russian officials said Saturday that Ukraine’s forces in the city had been surrounded; Ukrainian officials said the city’s not encircled and fighting continues, Bloomberg reported. In Donetsk oblast, the major and strategic city of Sloviansk is reported to be under heavy fire, the city’s mayor said Sunday.
As of July 1, almost 350 children have been killed since the war started, according to Ukraine’s prosecutor general. An estimated quarter of a million have been forcibly deported to Russia. The war has also reportedly has dealt a devastating toll on Ukraine's education institutions. The PGO said that 2,102 had been damaged by Russian bombing and shelling, including 215 that were fully destroyed.
In the Kharkiv region, Russian troops are looking to regain their positions near Ukraine’s second largest city, lost during a counteroffensive early in the war, according to the military staff in Kyiv - Bloomberg
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the rebuilding plan that Ukraine plans to unveil in Lugano at a reform conference from Monday will be “reconstruction in the broadest sense of the word…it is necessary not only to restore everything that the occupiers destroyed, but to create a new basis for our life, for Ukraine -- safe, modern, convenient, barrier-free,” Zelenskiy said Saturday in his nightly address to the nation.
Ukraine has called for a ship carrying grain from a Russian-occupied part of the country to be seized. The ship is currently lying off the Turkish coast. The BBC has been monitoring the Russian-flagged ship, the Zhibek Zholy, on its route from the Ukrainian port of Berdyansk to the Turkish port of Karasu. Read more here
Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed that the Western response to his war in Ukraine is pushing Russia and Belarus towards unification, reports Newsweek. Talks of possible unification between Russia and its ally Belarus gained momentum in late 2020 when Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko was supported financially and politically by Putin amid protests that broke out after allegations of voter fraud during the country's presidential election.
BBC: Ukraine loses $135 million as Russia steals water from Dnipro River to supply occupied Crimea. According to BBC, the Russian military seized the Kakhovka reservoir in Kherson Oblast during the first days of the all-out invasion and let the water go down the 400-kilometer-long North Crimean Canal, blocked by Ukraine in 2014 when Russia illegally annexed the peninsula. Every second, 50 cubic meters of water flow through the canal, which costs Ukraine around $1.1 million per day - Kyiv Independent
Sunday read
Serhii Plokhy of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute: Putin’s imperialist narrative ‘is being crushed’.’ The Ukrainian historian on the end of empire, life under a nuclear shadow — and why Putin’s war might end in a new Russia
Read the full Financial Times feature here