As the war enters its 861st day, here are the top developments.
Here is the situation on Friday, July 5, 2024.
Struggle
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Two people were killed and 26 others wounded in Russian strikes in regions of Ukraine stretching from the south to the east and northeast, Ukrainian authorities said. A missile strike in the southern Odesa region killed one woman and wounded seven people, while a second woman was killed and a man wounded in an attack in the village of Ruska Lozova in the Kharkiv region.
- A six-year-old girl has died in hospital after a drone strike in the city of Primorsko-Akhtarsk in Russia's Krasnodar region, regional governor Veniamin Kondratyev said. On Friday, he said six people were hospitalized after the attack.
- Nine people, including four children, were injured in a drone attack and shelling in the town of Novohrodivka in the Donetsk region, on the front line of Ukraine's front, according to Governor Vadym Filashkin.
- Dnipropetrovsk Governor Serhiy Lysak said seven people were wounded in the southern city of Nikopol following a series of drone and artillery strikes by Russian forces. A wounded woman also died from injuries sustained Wednesday in the region's main city, Dnipro. That attack had killed at least seven people.
- Two civilians have been injured in a drone strike in the southern city of Kherson, the city government said.
- Ukraine's military has announced that its forces have withdrawn from a neighborhood on the outskirts of Chasiv Yar, a strategically important town in the eastern Donetsk region that has been reduced to rubble under a months-long Russian assault.
Politics and diplomacy
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According to Radio Free Europe and the Financial Times, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Friday. The Kremlin neither confirmed nor denied the visit. It would be the first time since Russia's invasion of Ukraine that Putin and Orban have met inside Russia.
- Earlier this week, Orban visited kyiv and urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to consider a ceasefire to speed up the end of the war with Russia. Hungary currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Union and a visit to Moscow would provoke fury in the bloc.
- Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is scheduled to make his first visit to Russia since the invasion of Ukraine on July 8-9, juggling a delicate balance between maintaining a long-standing alliance with Moscow and seeking closer security ties with the West. He last visited Russia in 2019 and hosted Putin in New Delhi in 2021.
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A Russian military court has remanded Col. Artyom Gorodilov, commander of the 83rd Guards Air Assault Brigade, in pre-trial detention for two months on charges of large-scale fraud, according to the state news agency TASS. Gorodilov is the latest in a series of high-ranking Russian military officers and senior defense officials who have been arrested on corruption charges in recent months.
Weapons
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Russia's Defense Ministry is conducting exercises with mobile nuclear missile launchers, the Interfax news agency reported. Crews of two Yars missile launchers will travel more than 100 kilometers and practice camouflage and deployment, the agency said, with more crews expected to join the exercises in the future.
- The Russian Defense Ministry also reported that its forces destroyed 50 Ukrainian drones both on Russian territory and in parts of Ukraine that it had annexed. Of these, 14 were destroyed over Krasnodar, 26 over Zaporizhia and 10 over Rostov.
