Here is how things stand on Monday, June 30:
Fighting
- Russia launched its biggest aerial attack on Ukraine since the beginning of its full-scale invasion overnight on Sunday, firing a total of 537 aerial weapons, including 477 drones and decoys and 60 missiles, according to the Ukrainian air force.
- Ukrainian forces intercepted 475 of the weapons, but the military said F-16 pilot Lieutenant Colonel Maksym Ustimenko was killed “while repelling” the “massive enemy air attack”.
- At least four others were also killed in the air raids, in Kherson, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Kostiantynivka regions, the Associated Press news agency reported, citing local officials.
- The aerial attacks were also far-reaching, targeting regions as far away as Lviv, in the far west, where a drone attack caused a large fire at an industrial facility in the city of Drohobych, and cut electricity to parts of the area.
- Poland said it scrambled aircraft, together with other NATO countries, to ensure the safety of Polish airspace during the attack. None of the Russian missiles entered Poland’s airspace, the command said.
- In addition, two people were killed by Russian shelling, including a 70-year-old woman who was found under the rubble of a nine-storey building in the Zaporizhia region, AP reported.
- Russia’s Defence Ministry said it intercepted three Ukrainian drones overnight, and claimed control of the village of Novoukrainka in the partially Russian-occupied Donetsk region.
- The RIA Novosti news agency said one person was killed by a Ukrainian drone in the Russian-controlled part of Ukraine’s Luhansk region, while the acting governor of Russia’s Kursk said that two people were injured in a Ukrainian attack on the border region.
Weapons
- Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the air attacks highlight the need for further support from the United States and Western allies to strengthen the country’s air defences.
- He also signed a decree to pull Ukraine out of the Ottawa Convention banning the production and use of anti-personnel mines, saying Russia has never been a party to the treaty “and is using anti-personnel mines with utmost cynicism”.
- Roman Kostenko, a senior Ukrainian lawmaker, said that parliamentary approval was still needed to withdraw from the treaty. He said legislators will hold a vote on the move.
- Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs also said the country has “made the difficult but necessary political decision to stop the implementation of irrelevant obligations under the Ottawa Convention” because it has led to an “asymmetric advantage” for Russia.
Politics and diplomacy
- US Senator Lindsey Graham told ABC News that the country’s Congress will begin voting on new Russian sanctions after President Donald Trump told him, “It’s time to move your bill.”
- Meanwhile, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told state television that European countries would feel the consequences of imposing harsher sanctions on Russia. “The more serious the package of sanctions, which, I repeat, we consider illegal, the more serious will be the recoil from a gun to the shoulder. This is a double-edged sword,” he said.
- Russian spy chief Sergei Naryshkin said in remarks published on Sunday that he had spoken to the director of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), John Ratcliffe, and that they had agreed to call each other at any time.
