WAR IN UKRAINE: July 4, 2022

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS: Day 131

Ukraine's military has confirmed that the eastern city of Lysychansk has fallen to Russian forces. Its general staff said that "in order to preserve the lives of Ukrainian defenders, a decision was made to withdraw.” Regional Governor Serhiy Haidai says he thinks Moscow will now focus its attacks on the city of Slovyansk and the town of Bakhmut in the Donetsk region - BBC
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, vowed to regain Lysychansk with the help of long-range western weapons. “We will return thanks to our tactics, thanks to the increase in the supply of modern weapons. Ukraine does not give anything up,” he said in an evening address.

The UK wants to follow the example of Canada and seize the assets of Russians in the UK in order to give them to Ukraine, Liz Truss has said. It comes as the foreign secretary is due to give a speech on Monday to a Ukraine reconstruction conference in Lugano, Switzerland, which will be attended either in person or virtually by most of Ukraine’s senior political leadership - The Guardian
Ukraine has outlined the conditions under which negotiations with Russia can resume. Mykhailo Podolyak of the Presidential Administration provided a list of conditions under which Ukraine is ready to negotiate. "Immediate ceasefire. Withdrawal of Z-troops from Ukraine. Return of abducted citizens. Extradition of war criminals. Reparations mechanism. Recognition of Ukraine's sovereign rights.” Podolyak added that the Russian side knows Ukraine’s conditions perfectly well.
A new New York Times investigation has revealed that Nazism references spiked to record-high levels the day Russia invaded Ukraine. The outlet surveyed eight million articles about Ukraine collected from over 8,000 Russian websites since 2014, and found that since 2014, references to Nazism were “relatively flat for eight years and then spiked to unprecedented levels on February 24” of this year.