Here is the situation on Monday, July 17, 2023.
Battle
- Russian President Vladimir Putin said Ukraine’s counteroffensive had failed. “All enemy attempts to breach our defenses … have been unsuccessful since the offensive began. The enemy is unsuccessful,” the Russian leader said in a TV interview.
- Putin also said Russia has “adequate stockpiles” of cluster munitions and warned that Moscow “reserves the right to take countermeasures” if Ukraine uses the controversial weapons.
- Ukrainian officials said fighting on the Eastern Front had “intensified” and Russian forces had “actively attacked the Kupiansk sector in Kharkiv” for two consecutive days. “We are on the defensive,” Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar wrote on the news app Telegram. “There are fierce fights. The positions of both sides change dynamically several times a day.”
- Maliar also said the two armies clashed around the devastated eastern city of Bakhmut, but Ukrainian forces were “gradually advancing” along their southern flank.
- Separately, the Ukrainian military said it had seized control of part of a south-eastern village in the Donetsk region, near a string of small settlements that Ukraine recaptured in June. “The enemy made an unsuccessful attempt to regain lost positions in the northern part of Staromayorske,” the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said in an update that marked the first official acknowledgment of progress in the village.
- A spokesman for Ukraine’s Southern Command also said that Ukrainian forces had advanced more than a kilometer (0.6 miles) in part of the southern front.
- Ukrainian officials said one man was killed and seven wounded after Russia shelled a district of the eastern city of Kharkiv. According to Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office, two boys, aged eight and 10, were also injured when an explosive device abandoned by Russian forces detonated in the southern Kherson region.
- Meanwhile, Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces prevented Ukraine from attacking the Black Sea port of Sevastopol, destroying seven aerial and two underwater drones in the process. There were no casualties or damage in the attack on the annexed Crimean Peninsula.
- The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region said Ukrainian forces fired Grad rockets at the Russian border town of Shebekino, killing a woman on her bicycle. He said Ukrainian shelling of two other settlements in Belgorod did not cause casualties but damaged three houses, warehouses, a fence, a water tower and a power line belonging to an agricultural company.
diplomacy
- South Korea pledged to provide Ukraine with more demining equipment after President Yoon Suk-yeol’s visit to Kiev over the weekend.
- US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called for a doubling of support for Ukraine, saying “this is the best we can do for the global economy”. Speaking on the sidelines of a G20 finance ministers’ summit in India, Yellen said that “budget support is vital to Ukraine’s resistance” and that one of Washington’s main goals is to “fight Russia’s efforts to evade our sanctions.”
Black Sea grain deal
- According to MarineTraffic.com, the last ship traveling under a United Nations-brokered deal allowing safe Black Sea exports of Ukrainian grain left the port of Odessa early Sunday.
- Russia has not agreed To new ships since June 27, and the initiative expires on Monday unless Moscow agrees to an extension.
Business
- According to a decree signed by the country’s president, the Russian state has taken over the Russian subsidiary of French yoghurt maker Danone, as well as the Carlsberg beer group’s stake in a local brewery.
- Carlsberg said it had received “no official information” on the move, adding that the prospects for a full divestment of its business in Russia are now highly uncertain. Carlsberg said in June it had signed an agreement to sell its Russian business, subject to regulatory approvals.