Every week we wrap up the must-reads from our coverage of the war in Ukraine, from news and features to analysis, visual guides and opinion.
Russia and Ukraine warn conflict could spill over into the Black Sea
Russia and Ukraine issued tit-for-tat warnings that they could target all vessels sailing to and from each other’s Black Sea ports, Julian Borger reported, after a week in which Russia pulled out of a UN-backed deal that had allowed Ukrainian grain to be exported via that route.
“The fate of the cruiser Moskva proves that the defence forces of Ukraine have the necessary means to repel Russian aggression at sea,” the defence ministry in Kyiv said on Thursday, in a reference to the sinking of a flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet last year.
A day earlier, Russia had said it would consider all ships sailing to Ukrainian ports as potential military targets, a move which prompted the US to warn that Russia may attack civilian ships on the Black Sea and then put the blame on Ukrainian forces.
On Monday Russia pulled out of the year-old deal brokered by the UN and Turkey which had allowed Ukrainian grain to be shipped out of Black Sea ports, much of it to developing countries, as reported by Shaun Walker and Patrick Wintour. The withdrawal caused a spike in grain prices, Joanna Partridge wrote, reigniting fears of the impact on poorer, grain-importing countries.
Moscow’s pullout was internationally condemned. The head of USAid, Samantha Powell, said Russian president Vladimir Putin’s justification for the withdrawal was full of “falsehood and lies”, as Shaun, Patrick, Nick Hopkins and Jamie Wilson reported separately.
Moscow also launched a wave of deadly strikes on the port cities of Odesa and Mykolaiv, which Ukraine said targeted grain facilities and port infrastructure, Shaun reported. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, described the attacks on Odesa, which bore the burnt of the strikes, as part of a concerted Russian effort to prevent Ukrainian grain reaching world markets.
A video purporting to show the Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin appeared this week, in which he addressed his fighters in Belarus and called the Russian war effort in Ukraine a “disgrace”, Andrew Roth reported.
The video, the first footage of the Russian warlord to emerge since his mutiny last month, was published by two Telegram channels affiliated with Wagner and showed a man who resembled and sounded like Prigozhin.
Wagner troops would not fight in Ukraine for now, Prigozhin said. “What is happening at the front now is a disgrace in which we do not need to participate,” he said. “[We will] wait for the moment when we can prove ourselves in full.” Instead they would be “going on a new path to Africa”.
The Wagner Orchestra Telegram channel said Prigozhin addressed several thousand fighters, although that was unclear from the video. Earlier this week, a Ukrainian official said only a “few hundred” Wagner fighters had so far relocated to Belarus, as reported by Shaun Walker.
However the opposition Belarusian Hajun project, which monitors troop movements in Belarus, says an estimated 2,000-2,500 Wagner fighters are now in the country.
Militia units involved in human rights abuses in Izium identified
An investigation has identified the military units under Russia’s command that carried out human rights abuses – including the torture and killing of civilians – during the occupation of the Ukrainian city of Izium last year, Nick Hopkins, Jamie Wilson and Luke Harding reported exclusively.
Russian forces seized Izium in April 2022, after a month-long battle. Six months later Ukrainian troops liberated the city in the north-east of the country, during a counteroffensive. They discovered a mass grave, containing 447 bodies including the remains of 22 Ukrainian soldiers, as well as several torture chambers.
The report by the Centre for Information Resilience named four militia units that allegedly abused civilians and prisoners of war. All were from the so-called Luhansk and Donetsk people’s republics, pro-Moscow puppet administrations established in 2014 after Russia’s covert military takeover of some of the eastern Donbas region.
The soldiers were poorly trained, badly equipped and stole “everything” local people said, forcing homeowners to kneel at gunpoint, and even removing double glazing from windows. “They drank a lot and swapped humanitarian aid for homemade vodka,” one survivor recounted. Drunken LPR fighters shot dead two children – aged 12 and 13 – as they ran to a basement, just before a 6pm curfew.
Two dead after explosions on Kerch Bridge linking Crimea and Russia
Twin explosions rocked the Kerch Bridge connecting Crimea to mainland Russia, killing two people and temporarily closing the main conduit for Russian road traffic to the annexed peninsula, Emma Graham-Harrison, Shaun Walker and Andrew Roth reported.
The apparent attack was the second time that the bridge, a much-hated symbol of Russia’s occupation of Crimea and a high-prestige infrastructure project for the Kremlin, has been targeted since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine.
Reports suggested the attack was carried out using several unmanned, explosive-carrying amphibious vehicles, or sea drones, that were directed to the bridge and then detonated from beneath the roadway, Andrew reported in an explainer on the importance of the bridge.
Ukraine has a policy of disavowing attacks in Crimea and raids into mainland Russia and did not claim responsibility for this attack.
Russia called it an act of Ukrainian “terrorism”, a charge that was dismissed by Ukrainian officials including the mayor of Kharkiv. In an interview with Luke Harding, Nick Hopkins and Jamie Wilson, Ihor Terekhov said: “How can they speak about terrorism after unleashing war on Ukraine? They are shooting and killing our people.”
The underground Tatars sabotaging Russia in Crimea
A Crimean Tatar-led underground movement is already active behind Russian lines and hundreds of young Tatar men are ready to take up arms to liberate the occupied peninsula, a veteran community leader told Julian Borger.
Mustafa Dzemilev, widely seen as the godfather of the Crimean Tatar rights movement, pointed to operations by the Atesh guerrilla group, comprising Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians and Russians, in Crimea and other occupied Ukrainian regions.
Atesh, which means “fire” in Crimean Tatar, was created in September last year, primarily to carry out acts of sabotage from within the ranks of the Russian army. It claims more than 4,000 Russian soldiers have already enrolled in an online course on how to “survive the war” by wrecking their own equipment.
There is no evidence linking the group to the latest attack on the Kerch Bridge but the group has claimed a string of smaller-scale attacks, blowing up Russian checkpoints, assassinating Russian officers, setting fire to barracks and feeding sensitive information to Ukrainian intelligence.
‘Every single morning I curse him’
Every morning, when Vira Chernukha wakes up amid the rubble of the Ukrainian village of Dementiivka, the first thing she does is curse Vladimir Putin.
Once a peaceful settlement of dozens of small houses, after seven months of Russian occupation the village now has only one remaining resident, Chernukha, 76, along with two stray puppies and a cat. The others either died in the shelling or moved to Russia, about 5 miles away.
“We had such a beautiful village you can’t even imagine,” she told Lorenzo Tondo in tears. “You could hear children’s voices everywhere. Beautiful! And now it’s a dead zone. No one’s here.”
Chernukha says she was taken to a hospital in Russia after being hit by Russian shrapnel. But determined to return home to the house she built with her husband, she embarked on a journey that took her across Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, arriving back in May, exactly a year after she was forced to leave.
Ukraine’s National Opera celebrates year of live shows
Much of the troupe is still abroad, performances are interrupted by air raid sirens and the number of tickets sold for each performance is limited to the number of people who can fit in the theatre’s basement shelter.
But as the curtain comes down on Sunday afternoon at the National Opera of Ukraine in Kyiv – the end of the storied theatre’s 155th season – the artists can reflect on a remarkably full year of performances for a theatre operating in the heart of a country at war, Shaun Walker reported.
The atmosphere in Ukraine’s capital city these days can feel jarring, with busy parks and packed restaurant terraces bringing back something of the pleasant summer vibe of prewar Kyiv, despite the frequent night-time drone attacks.
Inside the grand opera house, too, on the surface much has returned to normal. Last week, many of the audience were dressed in their finest outfits to watch a ballet double bill, waiters filled flutes with local sparkling wine at the interval and audience members posed for photographs in front of gilded mirrors and ornate chandeliers.
Go a bit deeper, though, and the majority of both the audience and artists are harbouring painful memories from the past 18 months.
