What has happened in the last few hours?
This is the main war news at 12:00 on the 489th day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine:
The Kremlin drops the charges against Prigozhin and the rest of Wagner’s rebels. Just three days after Russia’s worst armed uprising since the 1990s, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has concluded the ongoing case against Wagner and its owner Yevgeny Prigozhin, and its military will emerge from the mutiny unscathed. “Your participants ceased actions on June 24, aimed directly at committing a crime. “Taking into account these and other circumstances relevant to the investigation, the investigative authority issued its decision on June 27 to discontinue the criminal proceedings,” says a statement from the authority.
Prigozhin’s jet lands in Belarus. Vladimir Putin on Monday evening offered Wagner’s rebels departure for Belarus as an honorable ending to their mutiny, and a day later the private plane of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the owner of the mercenary company, landed in the country with an iron fist, led by Alexander Lukashenko “The Embraer Legacy 600 plane with the tail code RA-02795 took off from Rostov-on-Don and landed at the Machulishchi airbase near Minsk,” reported the Belarusian channel Gayun after observing its route on the Flightradar portal. It could not be determined whether Prigozhin was traveling in the device.
Lukashenko urges Belarusian army to be ‘combat ready’ after Wagner mutiny Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has called on the army to “combat readiness” after the mutiny of the Russian Wagner mercenary group. “I gave all the orders for the army to be fully combat-ready,” said Lukashenko, Moscow’s main ally, according to the state-run Belta news agency.
The UN has documented 77 summary executions of Ukrainian civilians by Russian forces. At least 864 Ukrainian civilians (including 94 women and seven children) have been arbitrarily detained by Russian occupying forces, according to a new United Nations report, which also shows at least 77 of them were summarily executed. These are some of the main conclusions of the document, presented today at a press conference by the head of the UN Human Rights Office, Matilda Bogner, which also reveals that in 91% of cases, detainees reported suffering torture and ill-treatment have. including sexual violence.
Rail traffic in Crimea was again interrupted due to “damage to the tracks”. The governor of the annexed Crimea, Sergei Axiónov, reported that rail traffic on the peninsula was again interrupted due to “damage to the tracks”, the causes of which he did not name. “There was damage to the railways in the Kirovski district. There were no casualties (…) the repair work will take between 4 and 8 hours,” Axionov wrote on his Telegram channel. According to the Russian Telegram broadcaster Baza, the railway lines were destroyed by an explosion, as a result of which a freight car derailed.