As the war enters it 476th day, these are the main developments.
This is the situation as it stands on Wednesday, June 13, 2023.
Fighting:
- Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hailed the “forward movement” of his troops near the long-besieged city of Bakhmut in the east and on the war’s southern front.
- NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Ukraine was making progress in its counteroffensive against Russia and said NATO leaders would work “to sustain and step up support for Ukraine” when they meet next month.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, told a group of military bloggers that Ukraine’s counteroffensive was failing with Kyiv’s losses “10 times bigger than Russia’s”.
- Ukraine also lost a significant number of its Western-supplied military vehicles, Putin said in the meeting. Russia’s defence ministry earlier released a video showing what it said were German-made Leopard tanks and United States-made Bradley Fighting Vehicles that had been captured by Russian troops.
- In its counteroffensive, Ukraine has “proved highly adept at masking their strategic aims with feints, disinformation and by shuffling troops from one area to another, keeping Russian military planners guessing as to their next move,” according to Al Jazeera’s defence editor, Alex Gatopoulos.
- Major-General Sergei Goryachev, a top Russian officer, was killed in a Ukrainian missile attack on the Zaporizhia front on Monday, a Russian-backed official in Ukraine announced.
- Ukraine said Russia launched a “massive missile attack” overnight on the city of Kryvyi Rih, killing at least 11 people and wounding 28.
- Putin claimed it was Ukraine that attacked the Nova Kakhovka dam, allegedly with missiles, causing last week’s breach. The dam was occupied by Russia and Ukraine blames Moscow for the disaster.
- Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia’s mercenary Wagner Group, said he was “not sure” if his men would remain in Ukraine amid a bitter standoff with the Russian defence ministry over a new requirement for private armies to sign contracts.
- Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said it had arrested a group of former defence industry workers suspected of supplying Ukraine with sensitive military information and planning sabotage attacks.
- Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said Russian tactical nuclear weapons would be deployed in his country in “several days” and he would not hesitate to use them in case of aggression, according to the Belarusian Telegraph Agency.
Diplomacy
- International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said he would visit the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant on Wednesday to assess the effects of last week’s dam breach.
- France said it uncovered a Russia-linked misinformation campaign that had faked its foreign ministry website, targeted other government websites and usurped several French media as part of broader efforts to smear Ukraine and its Western allies.
- The editor-in-chief of New Zealand’s national public service radio broadcaster apologised for publishing “pro-Kremlin garbage” after changes were found to have been made to more than a dozen wire agency articles covering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
- Putin said Moscow had a “peace plan” for Ukraine and that Western countries must stop sending arms supplies to Kyiv.
Weapons
- The US announced a new $325m military aid package for Kyiv including munitions for air defence systems, ammunition and vehicles, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a news release.
- Defence ministers from the Joint Expeditionary Force, a United Kingdom-led alliance of several European countries, announced a new $116m package of air defence capabilities for Ukraine.
- Germany’s Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said the country is preparing to send more than 100 Leopard 1A5 tanks to Ukraine by the end of this year, the Die Welt newspaper reported.
- Russia’s Putin told military bloggers that the country has stepped up production of key weapons but lacks “high-precision ammunition and drones”.
- The UK’s defence ministry said Russia was probably receiving drones in “larger consignments by ship from Iran via the Caspian Sea” and that it was also working on domestic production, probably with Iranian assistance. Tehran has admitted to selling drones to Russia but said it was months before Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
- Denmark is to propose an August start date for teaching Ukrainian pilots how to fly F-16 fighter jets, Danish news agency Ritzau reported.
