Global Courant
This is the situation on Monday, July 24, 2023.
To fight
A Russian airstrike on the Ukrainian port city of Odessa killed two people and severely damaged a historic Orthodox cathedral. UNESCO condemned the “brutal” attack as an “escalation of violence against Ukraine’s cultural heritage”. The rocket attacks injured 22 people, including four children, and destroyed six homes and apartment buildings, Ukrainian officials said. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy vowed to retaliate for the attack, saying that “they (Russia) will surely feel this”. However, Russia blames the damage to the cathedral on Ukrainian air defenses. It said it hit all intended targets in the Odessa attack and claimed the locations were used to prepare “terrorist actions” against Russia. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN Ukraine has recaptured half of the territory Russia seized during its invasion, but said Kiev faced a very uphill battle to regain more. In Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv, Governor Oleh Synyehubov reported that two people were killed in Russian attacks on the northeastern province on Saturday, when Russia attacked populated areas of Kharkiv, Chuhuiv, Kupiansk and Izium districts. On the frontline of Donetsk, the Russian army shelled the town of Chasiv Yar with cluster munitions, destroying the Palace of Culture, which had been used as a humanitarian headquarters, according to Ukrainian media reports.
Diplomacy
Russian President Vladimir Putin met his Belarusian counterpart, Alexander Lukashenko, for talks in St Petersburg, claiming that Ukraine’s counter-offensive had “failed”. Lukashenko said Wagner troops, who had moved to Belarus after their short-lived uprising against Moscow, wanted to go west “on an excursion to Warsaw, to Rzeszow” in Poland, but that Minsk would not allow the mercenaries to move. “I keep them in central Belarus, as we agreed… We control what happens,” Lukashenko said with Wagner. The two men also suggested that Poland had ambitions to seize parts of western Ukraine for itself, prompting an immediate rebuttal from Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. “Putin’s attempts to drive a wedge between Kiev and Warsaw are as futile as his failed invasion of Ukraine,” Kuleba wrote on Twitter. Poland, which has strengthened its border with Belarus following Wagner’s move, said a new battalion of sappers would be formed in the country’s northeast.
Military aid
The top United States diplomat told CNN he believed Ukraine will get US-made F-16 fighter jets. “The main focus is to make sure that when they do, they are properly trained, they are able to maintain the planes and use them in a smart way,” Blinken said. (TagsToTranslate)News
