As the war enters its 467th day, here is a look at the main developments.
This is the situation as it stands on Monday, June 5, 2023.
Fight
- The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense renewed its request for operational silence around the long-awaited counter-offensive against Russia, posting a video with the words: “plans love silence” .
- Russia’s defense ministry said it rejected a cross-border incursion by a group of pro-Ukrainian “saboteurs”, the Interfax news agency reported.
- Pro-Ukraine groups of Russian partisans said they had captured several soldiers during a cross-border raid into southern Russia and would hand them over to Ukrainian authorities.
- Russia has launched a new wave of airstrikes in Ukraine, hitting an airfield in a central region but failing to hit the capital Kyiv, Ukrainian authorities said.
- A Russian air raid hit a residential district in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro, killing a two-year-old girl and injuring 22 residents, the region’s governor Serhiy Lysak said.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said at least 500 Ukrainian children have been killed since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
- Alexander Kamyshin, a senior Ukrainian government official, expressed “disbelief” after learning that nearly half of Kyiv’s bomb shelters examined by an internal audit were either closed or not. should be used.
- Fighting continues around Bakhmut, a city in eastern Ukraine that has seen the longest and bloodiest battle since the war began.
Diplomacy
- Ukraine’s Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov rejected the Indonesian peace plan proposed by its defense minister during a security summit in Singapore. “It’s like a Russian plan, not (an) Indonesian plan,” Reznikov said.
- NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said representatives from Turkey and Sweden will meet on June 12 to try to bridge their differences over the Nordic country joining the security alliance.
- Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu warned against building “NATO-like” military alliances in the Asia-Pacific, saying they would plunge the region into a “whirlpool” of conflict.
Weapons
- Zelenskyy said Russia was using a network of suppliers to evade international sanctions designed to prevent it from building missiles and other weapons. He accused unnamed countries and companies of helping Russia acquire technology with a focus on building missiles.
- The Kremlin said France and Germany’s supply of long-range missiles to Kyiv would lead to a further round of “spiralling tension”. Ukraine has asked Germany for Taurus cruise missiles, which have a range of 500km (310 miles), while President Emmanuel Macron said France would provide Ukraine with missiles with a range that would allow it to carry out long-term expected counter-offensive.
