list of key events, day 840

Here is the situation on Friday 14 June 2024.

Battler

• The Ukrainian army said its forces were fighting fierce battles near Khasiv Yar, a strategic hilltop settlement in Donetsk, and that the situation was “tense.” A civilian was killed further south on the front line near Pokrovsk, while another man was killed by Russian fire in the southern Kherson region.
• Russian journalist Valery Kozhin, working for the Russian state television channel NTV, was killed in the Ukrainian shelling of a Russian-occupied village in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, Russian news agencies reported, citing the mayor of town of Horlivka near the accident site. took place. NTV reported earlier that three of its employees, including Kozhin, were injured and taken to hospital.
• US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Russia’s advance into Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region was slowing and the front line was stabilizing after some allies lifted restrictions on Kiev’s use of weapons donated within Russian territory.

Politics and diplomacy

• The Group of Seven (G7) meeting in Italy has agreed to provide financial support of $50 billion to Ukraine by the end of the year, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said. The deal will be financed by profits on frozen Russian assets.
• US President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have signed a 10-year bilateral security agreement aimed at strengthening Ukraine’s defense against Russian invasion and moving Ukraine closer to NATO membership.
• Ukraine also signed a 10-year security agreement with Japan. “In 2024, Japan will provide Ukraine with 4.5 billion dollars and will continue to support us throughout the ten-year duration of the agreement,” Zelensky said on X. The agreement, he added, provides security assistance and defence, humanitarian aid, technical and financial aid. cooperation.
• The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, said in an annual report that around 750,000 people became newly displaced within Ukraine last year following Russia’s full-scale invasion, with a total of 3.7 million internally displaced persons registered by the end of 2023. The number of Ukrainian refugees and asylum seekers increased from over 275,000 to six million.
• Human rights organization Global Rights Compliance said in a report that Russian forces deliberately used civilian starvation as a military tactic during the 85-day siege of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol in 2022. The report found that forces Russians “systematically attacked objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population” such as food, water, energy and access to healthcare, and also cut off evacuation routes and blocked the arrival of humanitarian aid.
• Russian prosecutors said they would indict Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter arrested in March 2023, accusing the 32-year-old of gathering information for the US CIA on a Russian tank factory. Gershkovich, who is detained, has denied any wrongdoing. His employer said the accusation was “false and unfounded” and based on lies. Biden called his detention “totally illegal.” Prosecutors have not said when the trial will begin.

• The judge in the trial against director Zhenya Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk, two prominent figures of Russian theatre, accepted the prosecution’s request to close the trial to the public and the media due to unspecified “threats” made to witnesses. The pair were arrested in May last year and accused of “justifying terrorism” for their production of an award-winning play about Russian women who married Islamic State fighters. The women have pleaded not guilty and say the show was about preventing terrorism.

• German Moyzhes, a 39-year-old lawyer with dual Russian-German citizenship, was arrested in St. Petersburg and some independent Russian media reported that he was suspected of treason. Germany’s Federal Foreign Office told the Reuters news agency that its embassy in Moscow was in contact with Moyzhes’ family. There has been no official word from Russia about the detention.

• The Russian frigate Admiral Gorshkov and the nuclear-powered submarine Kazan, accompanied by a tugboat and a vessel carrying fuel, arrived in Cuba for a five-day visit seen as a show of force by Moscow amid the growing tension over the invasion of Ukraine.

Weapons

• Zelensky said at a news conference in Italy that Chinese President Xi Jinping had assured him in a phone call that China would not sell weapons to Russia. Speaking in English, Zelenskyy said Xi had told him he “will not sell any weapons to Russia.” Zelensky did not say when the conversation took place. The last publicly available phone call between Zelensky and Xi dates back to April 2023.
• The Dutch Defense Ministry said Kiev’s allies will send around 350 million euros ($376.74 million) worth of 152mm projectiles to Ukraine.
• Canadian Defense Minister Bill Blair said the country would begin sending a total of about 2,000 surplus unarmored rockets to Ukraine, as well as a selection of other weapons.