UKRAINE WRAP | Rescuers pull survivors from ruined Ukrainian apartment building

July 11 2022 — 22:09

Rescuers pull survivors from ruined Ukrainian apartment building

Rescuers pulled survivors on Monday from an apartment block destroyed by a Russian missile strike that killed 30 people in eastern Ukraine, Ukrainian officials said, while its President Volodymyr Zelensky lamented Moscow's “big advantage” in firepower despite billions in Western aid.

The civilian deaths hammered home the human cost of Russia's invasion, now in its fifth month, as Russian President Vladimir Putin's forces push to capture all of Ukraine's industrial Donbas region after declaring victory in one of its two provinces this month.

In the city of Chasiv Yar, rescue workers made voice contact with two people in the wreckage of the five-storey building demolished on Saturday. Video showed them pulling survivors from the debris, where up to two dozen people had been trapped.

But the death toll also rose steadily, Ukraine's State Emergency Service said, as more bodies were pulled from under ruined concrete. An official from the president's office put the number of dead at 30. One survivor, who gave her name as Venera, said she had wanted to save her two kittens.

“I was thrown into the bathroom, it was all chaos, I was in shock, all covered in blood,” she said, crying. “By the time I left the bathroom, the room was full up of rubble, three floors fell down.

“I never found the kittens. “Rescuers could be seen lifting one person from the ruins to a stretcher, and carrying away two bodies in white bags. Nine people have been rescued so far.

Military experts say Russia is using barrages like the one on Chasiv Yar in Donetsk province to pave the way for a renewed push for territory by ground forces, after claiming victory in Luhansk province on July 4. Both have been partly controlled by Russian-backed separatists since 2014.

Putin, who says he aims to hand control of Donbas to the separatists, on Monday eased rules for Ukrainians to acquire Russian citizenship."(Russia) indeed unfortunately has a big advantage in artillery,” President Zelensky told reporters in Kyiv on Monday alongside Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.

“With all the partners who are ready to give support, I talk about artillery. There is indeed not enough.”

A spokesperson for Ukraine's International Legion, a fighting unit of foreign troops, said Ukraine's heavy artillery was outnumbered roughly eight to one by Russian guns.

Reuters could not independently verify battlefield accounts.

Further north in the second-largest city of Kharkiv, Russian artillery, rocket and tank attacks killed three and injured 31, including two children, regional governor Oleh Synehubov said.

At least one strike hit a residential building in the city, where a column of flats had collapsed into rubble.

“I saw lights, the headlights of rescuers and I started screaming 'I am alive, please get me out',” survivor Valentina Popovichuk told Reuters on a nearby Kharkiv street.

She was asleep when her building was hit three or four times in the early morning. “The rescuers entered the hallway, knocked down the door and took me out."Kharkiv, in the northeast close to the Russian border but outside the Donbas, suffered heavy bombardment in the first few months of the war followed by a period of relative calm that has been shattered by renewed shelling in recent weeks.

Moscow denies targeting civilians but many Ukrainian cities, towns and villages have been left in ruins. Since the Feb. 24 invasion, attacks on a theatre, shopping centre and railway station have caused many civilian deaths.

Zelensky said Russia had carried out 34 air strikes since Saturday.

The war has exposed diplomatic faultlines across Europe and sent energy and food prices soaring.

The West aims to reopen Ukraine's Black Sea ports, which it says are shut by a Russian blockade, halting exports from one of the world's main sources of grain and threatening to worsen global hunger.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, who has offered to mediate on the grain issue, discussed it with Putin by telephone. The Kremlin said the talks took place in the run-up to a Russian-Turkish summit scheduled for the near future.

A summit with Erdogan would potentially be Putin's first face-to-face meeting with a leader of a NATO country since the invasion, and were it to take place in Turkey, it would also be his first trip outside the territory of the former Soviet Union.

Europe's dependence on Russian energy was preoccupying policymakers and businesses as the biggest pipeline carrying Russian gas to Germany began 10 days of annual maintenance. Governments, markets and companies are worried the shutdown might be extended because of the war.

Putin calls the conflict, Europe's biggest since World War 2, a “special military operation” to demilitarise Ukraine and rid it of dangerous nationalists. Ukraine and its Western allies say Putin's war is an imperial-style land grab.

Ukraine's general staff said Russia had launched a wave of bombardments as they seek to seize Donetsk. It said the widespread shelling amounted to preparations for an intensification of hostilities.

Russia's defence ministry said its missiles struck ammunition depots in Ukraine's central Dnipro region used to supply rocket launchers and artillery weapons.

Ukraine is preparing a counterattack in the south of the country where Russia seized territory early in the war.

Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk warned civilians in the Russian-occupied Kherson region in the south on Sunday to urgently evacuate. She gave no time frame.

Reuters 

July 11 2022 — 20:00

Leader of Russian-occupied Ukrainian town killed by car bomb 

The Russian-appointed administrator of a small town in the Russian-occupied east of Ukraine's Kharkiv region has been killed by a car bomb presumed to be the work of Ukrainian saboteurs, the regional occupation authorities said, according to Russia's TASS news agency.

The military-civilian administration said Yevgeny Yunakov, chief administrator of Velikyi Burluk, had been killed by a Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance group, according to TASS.

While Russia has said explicitly that it wants to remove the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk from Kyiv's control, it shows no sign of wanting to relinquish other territories that it has seized since invading Ukraine on February 24.

Alongside parts of the Kharkiv region in the east, Russian forces have also captured swathes of the southern Ukrainian provinces of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

Also on Monday, occupation authorities in Zaporizhzhia reported that Andrei Siguta, the Russian-installed district head of Melitopol, one of the first towns to fall to Russian forces, had escaped an attempt on his life by a saboteur shooting at his house.

Vladimir Rogov, a senior member of the Russian-appointed civil-military administration of Zaporizhzhia province, said on his Telegram channel that the would-be assassin had been killed in a shoot-out.

On June 24, a senior official in the Russian-installed Kherson regional administration was killed by a bomb, according to the deputy head of the administration.

The following day, the head of Ukrainian military intelligence declined to comment on partisan resistance efforts in occupied territories, but told Reuters that “those people who betrayed Ukraine and all those wretches who came here to destroy our country will be destroyed”.

Russia calls the invasion a “special military operation” and says it had to act to protect Ukraine's Russian-speakers from persecution and defuse a Western-backed threat to Russia's security.

Kyiv and the West say these are baseless pretexts for a war of imperial conquest.

Reuters 

July 11 2022 — 18:30

Ukraine calls for weapons supplies to punish Russia for citizenship decree

Ukraine called on its partners on Monday to impose new sanctions on Russia and step up supplies of heavy weapons to Kyiv to punish Moscow for simplifying the Russian naturalisation procedure for Ukrainian citizens.

In a statement on its website that quoted the foreign ministry, the ministry described the move by Moscow as an encroachment on Ukrainian sovereignty and said it was inconsistent with principles of international law.

Reuters 

July 11 2022 — 16:50

Austria plans to tap fuel reserves again during Schwechat refinery outage

Austria plans to release fuel from its national reserves for a second time since an accident at the country's biggest refinery, OMV's Schwechat, left a supply shortage, the energy ministry said in a statement on Monday.

Under the ministry's plan, 100,000 tonnes of diesel and 45,000 tonnes of intermediate products from which finished products will be produced will be released from the national fuel reserves.

The proposal must be approved by the main committee of the lower house of parliament, which is meeting on Monday evening. 

Reuters 

July 11 2022 — 16:45

Brazil's Bolsonaro says deal close to buy cheaper diesel from Russia

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said on Monday that a deal was close with Moscow to buy much cheaper diesel from Russia, in what would appear to be the latest tangible benefit stemming from his friendly relationship with President Vladimir Putin.

Bolsonaro, a far-right former army captain, gave no further details. Neither Bolsonaro's office, nor Brazil's Mining and Energy Ministry immediately responded to requests for comment.

“It makes sense and eventually could happen,” a senior Economy Ministry official said on condition of anonymity, declining to give further details.

A senior official from state-run oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA, or Petrobras, which supplies most fuel to the domestic market, told Reuters the idea was not surprising but raised concerns, without going into details.

High fuel prices have hurt Bolsonaro's re-election hopes ahead of an October vote, leaving him trailing in polls to leftist former leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

It was not immediately clear how Brazil would buy Russian diesel without coming up against Western sanctions, imposed on Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine.

Bolsonaro ignored US entreaties and met with Putin just days before the outbreak of war, and has since said his relationship with the Russian leader has allowed Brazil to maintain access to fertilisers that are crucial for the country's vast agribusiness sector.

Reuters 

July 11 2022 — 16:20

EU Commission wants to increase state aid for sanctions-hit companies

The European Commission wants to increase state aid granted to EU companies affected by the sanctions levied against Russia due to its invasion of Ukraine and is seeking feedback from EU countries before a final decision.

“As the crisis persists, we are also proposing to increase the maximum level of aid that can be granted under the Framework,” European Commission antitrust chief Magrethe Vestager said in a statement.

“We will decide on the way forward taking into account the views of all Member States and the need to preserve effective competition in the Single Market,” Vestager said.

The proposal sent to the 27 member states also takes into consideration the EU goal of becoming independent from fossil fuels and the need for additional measures to further accelerate the diversification of energy supplies.

Reuters 

July 11 2022 — 16:12

Russia says it shot down three Ukrainian military aircraft — Interfax

 Russia's defence ministry said that its forces had shot down two Su-25 fighter-bombers and a MiG-29 fighter jet in eastern Ukraine, the Interfax news agency reported on Monday.

The military also said it had destroyed two Ukrainian army hangars housing US. M777 howitzers, Interfax reported.

Reuters was not able to independently verify the reports. 

Reuters

July 11 2022 — 16:08

Putin and Erdogan hold talks on grain shipments, Kremlin says

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan held a phone call where they discussed co-ordinating efforts on exporting grain and safety of navigation in the Black Sea, the Kremlin said on Monday.

It said the talks took place in the run-up to a Russian-Turkish summit scheduled for the near future.

Reuters 

July 11 2022 — 15:56

Ukrainian artillery outnumbered eight to one by Russia- foreign legion

Ukraine's heavy artillery is outnumbered roughly eight to one by Russian guns, putting Ukraine at a significant disadvantage, a spokesperson for Ukraine's International Legion said on Monday.

Damien Magrou, spokesperson for the unit comprising foreign nationals, told a briefing in Kyiv that more arms from Ukraine's Western partners were needed to close the gap.

“We're entering a phase of the war where our disadvantage to the Russian forces in terms of heavy weaponry and artillery is very much being felt,” Magrou said.

He went on to say that the M142 HIMARS multiple rocket launch systems supplied by the US were having an impact on the battlefield.

“We can see the results already,” he said.Magrou also voiced concern about the fate of international fighters held captive in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic that Russia backs in eastern Ukraine.

The self-proclaimed entity previously sentenced three foreign nationals serving in other units of Ukraine's Armed Forces to death.

“It is a great worry for us to see the instrumentalisation of captives,” Magrou said.

Reuters 

July 11 2022 — 14:00

Death toll in Russian rocket attack on housing block rises to 24 -Ukraine

The death toll from a Russian rocket attack that hit an apartment block in eastern Ukraine over the weekend rose to 24 on Monday and rescuers were still combing the rubble for survivors, the State Emergency Service said.

Nine people have been rescued from the ruins of the five-storey block in the town of Chasiv Yar in Donetsk region that was struck late on Saturday, the agency said.

The emergency services said 55 people were helping the rescue effort.

Russia, which invaded Ukraine in what it calls a special military operation, denies targeting civilians.

Russia is expected to focus the brunt of its assault on eastern Ukraine on the region of Donetsk after claiming the capture of neighbouring Luhansk region. Together the regions make up the Donbas. 

-Reuters

July 11 2022 — 12:40

Russian shelling kills three, wounds 31 in Kharkiv -Ukraine governor

Three people were killed and 31 wounded on Monday after Russian shelling hit the northeast Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, the regional governor said.

The mayor of Kharkiv, Ukraine's second largest city, said on Telegram that the shelling struck civilian infrastructure including a commercial property and a tyre repair shop.

These are “places which had no military significance,” Oleh Synehubov said, adding that two children aged 4 and 16 were among dozens of people taken to hospital.

“Several shells hit the yards of private houses. Garages and cars were also destroyed, several fires broke out,” he said.

Russia, which invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, denies targeting civilians.

Kharkiv, which is close to the Russian border, suffered heavy bombardment in the initial phase of the war, followed by a period of relative calm, but that has been shattered by renewed shelling in recent weeks.

-Reuters

July 11 2022 — 11:22

Russia says it struck ammo depots in Ukraine's Dnipro region

 Russia's defence ministry said on Monday that its missiles struck ammunition depots in Ukraine's central Dnipro region used to supply rocket launchers and artillery weapons.

It also said that it struck deployment points for Ukrainian troops and foreign fighters in Kharkiv region.

Reuters was not able to independently verify the report. 

-Reuters

July 11 2022 — 10:57

Ukraine says it recaptured village in occupied Kherson region

Ukrainian forces have recaptured the village of Ivanivka in the southern Russian-occupied region of Kherson, a Ukrainian infantry brigade said on Monday.

“The only thing left of the Russian occupiers in Ivanivka are horrible memories and 'dead' military equipment,” it said.

Reuters could not immediately confirm the claim. There is more than one village of Ivanivka in the area. One of them is located along the front line. 

-Reuters

July 11 2022 — 09:59

Russian parliament mulls extraordinary meeting

The Russian parliament's organising council was due to meet on Monday to decide on calling an extraordinary meeting of parliament on July 15, but it was not immediately clear what was to be discussed.

The lower house of parliament said the council was to meet on Monday due to “issues that require urgent solutions” and the need to consider “government initiatives”. It gave no further details. At the scheduled start of the council meeting, there was no public live translation on the meeting and no agenda was published, Reuters reporters said. — Reuters

July 11 2022 — 09:23

Russian gas shipments to Germany due to stop

Russian natural gas shipments to Europe via the Nord Stream pipeline to Germany are due to stop on Monday for planned annual maintenance, and Western allies fear President Vladimir Putin will use the opportunity to cut off flows for good.

Meanwhile, the risk of a euro-area recession is growing as the likelihood of natural gas shortages rises and inflation remains at record levels, according to economists polled by Bloomberg. In Ukraine, the death toll continues to mount after Russian rockets hit an apartment building in Donetsk, killing at least 18 civilians, as the Kremlin’s forces were grinding their way through the region. President Volodymyr Zelensky will soon announce a cabinet shuffle and consolidation of ministries to try to weed out waste and corruption. 

Ukrainian rescue workers recovered 18 bodies from debris of the apartment block in Chasiv Yar, according to the State Emergencies Service. Russian rockets hit the five-story building near Kramatorsk in Ukraine’s eastern Donestsk region on Sunday. Ukraine sees signs of Russia preparing to renew military activity near Kramatorsk and Bakhmut as its forces continue to shell Ukrainian positions along the front line. According to The Times Zelensky is asking military commanders to draft plans for retaking southern Ukraine.

The probability of an economic contraction has increased to 45% from 30% in the previous survey of economists polled by Bloomberg and 20% before Russia invaded Ukraine. Germany, one of the most vulnerable members of the currency bloc to cutbacks in Russian energy flows, is more likely than not to see economic output shrink.

The rising cost of living is taking an increasing toll on business and consumers who’re emerging from two years of the Covid-19 pandemic. Lower shipments of gas from Russia, meanwhile, pose a threat to winter energy deliveries.

Bloomberg

July 11 2022 — 09:19

Death toll from Russian rocket attack on apartment block rises to 18

The death toll from a Russian rocket attack that hit an apartment block in eastern Ukraine over the weekend rose to 18 on Monday and rescuers were still racing to reach survivors in the rubble, the emergency services said.

Rescuers were in voice contact with two people trapped in the ruins of the five-storey block in the town of Chasiv Yar in Donetsk region that was struck late on Saturday, the service said.

“As of 08:45 on July 11 ... 18 people were killed, 6 people were rescued from the rubble, about 137 tonnes of rubble were cleared,” it said.

Russia, which invaded Ukraine in what it calls a special military operation, denies targeting civilians.

Reuters

July 11 2022 — 09:17

Lithuania expands restrictions on Kaliningrad trade

Lithuania on Monday expanded restrictions on trade through its territory to Russia's Kaliningrad exclave, as phase-ins on earlier announced EU sanctions set in, a Lithuanian customs spokesperson said. Goods sanctioned from Monday morning include concrete, wood, alcohol and alcohol-based industrial chemicals, the spokesperson said. — Reuters

July 11 2022 — 09:15

Europe on edge as Nord Stream Russian gas link enters planned shutdown

The biggest single pipeline carrying Russian gas to Germany started annual maintenance on Monday, with flows expected to stop for ten days, but governments, markets and companies are worried the shutdown might be extended due to war in Ukraine.The Nord Stream 1 pipeline transports 55-billion cubic metres (bcm) a year of gas from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea. Maintenance lasts from July 11 to 21.

Last month, Russia cut flows to 40% of the pipeline's total capacity, citing the delayed return of equipment being serviced by Germany's Siemens Energy, in Canada. Canada said at the weekend it would return a repaired turbine, but it also said it would expand sanctions against Russia's energy sector.

Europe fears Russia may extend the scheduled maintenance to restrict European gas supply further, throwing plans to fill storage for winter into disarray and heightening a gas crisis that has prompted emergency measures from governments and painfully high bills for consumers.

German economy minister Robert Habeck has said the country should confront the possibility that Russia will suspend gas flows through Nord Stream 1 beyond the scheduled maintenance period. “Based on the pattern we've seen, it would not be very surprising now if some small, technical detail is found and then they could say 'now we can't turn it on any more',” he said at an event at the end of June.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov dismissed claims that Russia was using oil and gas to exert political pressure, saying the maintenance shutdown was a regular, scheduled event, and that no-one was “inventing” any repairs.

There are other big pipelines from Russia to Europe but flows have been gradually declining, especially after Ukraine halted one gas transit route in May, blaming interference by occupying Russian forces.Russia has cut off gas supplies completely to several European countries that did not comply with its demand for payment in roubles.

“The last few months have shown one thing: Putin knows no taboos. A complete halt to gas supplies through the Nord Stream pipeline cannot therefore be ruled out,” Timm Kehler, MD of German industry association Zukunft Gas, said.

Reuters

July 11 2022 — 05:30

Ukraine tells residents to leave occupied south due to counterattack plans

Ukraine's deputy prime minister on Sunday urged civilians in the Russian-occupied southern region of Kherson to urgently evacuate as Ukraine's armed forces were preparing a counterattack there.

Ukraine lost control of most of the Black Sea region of Kherson, including its eponymous capital, in the first weeks after Russia's February 24 invasion.

“It's clear there will be fighting, there will be artillery shelling... and we therefore urge (people] to evacuate urgently,” Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said on national television.

She said she could not say when exactly the counteroffensive would happen. “I know for sure that there should not be women and children there, and that they should not become human shields.”

Reuters