Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Serpents’ Island in the Black Sea, where kyiv secured a high-profile victory at the start of the war with Russia, which entered its 500th day on Saturday. “Today we are on Serpents’ Island, which will never be conquered by the occupier, just like the rest of Ukraine, because we are the country of courage”, declared the head of the State in an undated video posted on social media on Saturday before heading to the headquarters of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, on the Golden Horn in Istanbul.
The main information:
– Six dead in a Russian bombardment
– Volodymyr Zelensky visited Serpents’ Island
– The UN denounces civilian casualties
– Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reiterates his support for Ukraine
Volodymyr Zelensky on Serpents’ Island on the 500th day
“I want to thank here, from this place of victory, each of our soldiers for these 500 days”, declared Volodymyr Zelensky in this video where we see him arriving by boat on the island and laying flowers in front of a memorial. Shortly after the start of the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the Russian army seized this island, a pebble strategically located a few tens of kilometers from the coast, where a small contingent of Ukrainian soldiers was stationed.
The Russian cruiser Moskva had demanded their surrender but the soldiers had refused and ordered the ship to “fuck off” during a radio exchange that became cult on the internet and featured on stamps in Ukraine. The Ukrainian soldiers had ended up being captured before being exchanged with Russian prisoners. The Moskva sank in the Black Sea after being hit, according to kyiv, by Ukrainian missiles. Moscow had only mentioned an explosion on board but had to abandon the island in June 2022.
The toll of civilian casualties announced by the UN
More than 9,000 civilians, including 500 children, have been killed since the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said in a statement on Friday, although UN officials have previously stated that the true number was likely much higher.
“Today we mark another grim milestone in the war that continues to exact a horrific toll on Ukrainian civilians,” Noel Calhoun, deputy head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, said in a statement. release on Friday, the 500th day since Feb. 24, 2022. While this year the death toll averaged lower than in 2022, it rose again in May and June, observers noted.
On June 27, 13 civilians, including four children, were killed in a missile strike on Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine. Far from the front line, in the western city of Lviv, ten people were killed in an early Thursday bombardment that the mayor described as the biggest attack on civilian infrastructure since the start of the invasion. 42 people were injured in the same attack, including three children, according to a report from the Ukrainian Ministry of the Interior released Friday morning.
UNESCO said the attack was also the first to occur in an area protected by the World Heritage Convention and damaged a historic building. The cities of Boutcha (in the north of the country, not far from the capital Kiev) and Mariupol (south-east) have become symbols of the atrocities of the conflict last year, and for which Russia has been accused of war crimes and genocides.
In the once sleepy town of Boutcha, AFP journalists discovered in April a street littered with corpses wearing civilian clothes. Satellite images later showed that several bodies had been lying on the ground since mid-March, when the city was under Russian control, with Ukrainian authorities claiming that hundreds of people had been killed in Buchha by Moscow forces which were retreating.
Six dead in Russian bombing
A Russian bombardment in eastern Ukraine on Saturday killed six people, on the 500th day of the war, announced Ukrainian Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko. “At least six people were killed and five injured” in this bombardment on the city of Lyman, said the governor of the Donetsk region on social networks.
In an undated video posted on social media on Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky celebrated his country’s “courage” by visiting Serpents’ Island in the Black Sea, where his army secured a high-profile victory earlier this year. the war against Russia. This symbolic milestone is crossed while Kiev, engaged in a counter-offensive against Moscow, obtained Friday the commitment of Washington to deliver cluster bombs to it, a few days before the NATO summit in Vilnius.
This Friday, the Ukrainian president obtained a diplomatic victory after Washington’s decision to deliver cluster munitions to him, which he described as an “indispensable aid program”. On the other hand, Washington dampened the hopes of Volodymyr Zelensky who was hoping for Western support for his country’s entry into NATO at the next Vilnius summit on July 11 and 12.