WAR IN UKRAINE: July 31, 2022
A photojournalist runs from a fire in a burning wheat field after Russian shelling a few kilometers from the Ukrainian-Russian border in the Kharkiv region on July 29. (via RFE/RL)
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS: DAY 158
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged civilians remaining in the easternmost Donbas region of the country to leave as the most intense fighting with Russian forces continues there. Zelensky said in a statement on Saturday that hundreds of thousands of people remain in the area and refuse to leave but must for their own safety. He said people specifically leaving Donetsk, the province in the Donbas that Russia has focused on capturing since taking the other province of Luhansk earlier this month, will reduce the number of people that the Russian army can kill.
Ukraine has called for the United Nations and Red Cross to be allowed to investigate the deaths at Olenivka prison in Russia-held eastern Ukraine. The Red Cross says it is seeking access to the prison to help with evacuating and treating the wounded. Ukraine says the site was targeted by Russia in an effort to destroy evidence of torture and killing. President Volodymyr Zelensky described the incident as a "deliberate Russian war crime". Ukraine and Russia blame each other for the attack that killed the prisoners.
Ukraine has labelled Russia a "terrorist state" after Moscow's UK embassy tweeted that Ukrainian Azov battalion soldiers deserved a "humiliating death" by hanging. Twitter did not remove the tweet from the Russian Embassy in the UK, but said it broke Twitter anti-hate rules. Besides the Ukrainian government, many other Twitter users voiced outrage at the tweet. Twitter said it may be in the public interest to keep the post accessible.
The Ukrainian military said on July 30 that it had killed more than 100 Russian soldiers and destroyed two ammunition dumps in fresh fighting in the Kherson region, where Kyiv is concentrating its biggest counteroffensive since the start of the war.
Seventeen vessels, including a Turkish-registered ship, are ready to set sail from three Ukrainian ports under a complex agreement brokered by Turkey and the United Nations. In all, some 580,000 tons of grain are on the ships, some of which had been waiting for several months to set sail but became stranded due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Aside from grain, corn is in some of the ship’s holds. Ukraine says the ships are ready to move however the green light has not yet been given by a joint operations center in Istanbul. Russia blames Ukraine for the hold-up. Security around the operation is very tight, with foreign journalists telling me they’ve been prevented from communicating with any of the vessels.
Ukrainian officials have called for an investigation after videos appeared on social media that apparently show Russian soldiers castrating, and then killing, a Ukrainian prisoner of war.
Iver Neumann, the director of Norway’s Fridof Nansen Institute and an expert on Russia, boldly predicts that Putin’s refusal to reform the country’s economy, magnified by the current invasion of its neighbor, could be “the beginning of the end” of his regime, although when this will occur is hard to predict. “So, since Putin's tenure sort of began 22 years ago, very little, if anything, has really happened to the economy. And I find it stunning that a trained Marxist like Putin simply doesn't grasp that material factors are of the essence,” Neumann, author of Russia And The Idea Of Europe, recently told RFE/RL’s Georgian Service.