Here are the key events on day 1,248 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Here is how things stand on Saturday, July 26:
Fighting
- Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces were facing fierce fighting around the city of Pokrovsk in the country’s east, a logistics hub near where Russia’s military has been announcing the near-daily capture of Ukrainian villages.
- Ukraine’s top commander, Oleksandr Syrskii, described Pokrovsk and five other sectors as among the most difficult theatres of war along the 1,000km (620-mile) front with Russia.
- Earlier on Friday, Russia’s Ministry of Defence announced the capture of two villages on either side of Pokrovsk – Zvirove to the west and Novoekonomichne to the east. A third village – Novotoretske – near Pokrovsk was declared “liberated” by Moscow earlier this week.
- President Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces were also “continuing to act” in border areas in the northern Sumy region, where Russian troops have gained a foothold in recent weeks.
- According to the popular Ukrainian military blog DeepState, Kyiv’s forces have retaken the previously lost village of Kindrativka in Sumy.
- Moscow is trying to establish in Sumy what Russia’s President Vladimir Putin calls a “buffer zone” between Russia and Ukraine.
Weapons and military aid
-
Zelenskyy has toured a local factory producing interceptor drones, increasingly seen as a solution to protecting Ukrainian cities from Russian air attacks, and said a goal had been set to make up to 1,000 of the weapons each day. He said interceptor drones had proved efficient at downing waves of Russian attack drones.
- Zelenskyy also said his country was working to secure international funding for 10 Patriot air defence systems, following a deal that allows European states to buy weaponry from the United States and donate it to Kyiv.
- The US announced that it is providing a $4bn loan guarantee for the purchase of American military equipment by Poland, which borders both Russia and war-torn Ukraine.
-
Russia’s only aircraft carrier, the 40-year-old Admiral Kuznetsov, is likely to be sold or scrapped, the chairman of Russia’s state shipbuilding corporation Andrei Kostin told the Kommersant newspaper.
Sanctions
- US President Donald Trump said he is looking at secondary sanctions on Russia amid the war in Ukraine.
- Acting US ambassador to the UN, Dorothy Shea, urged all countries, specifically naming China, to stop exports to Russia of dual-use goods that Washington says contribute to Russia’s industrial base and enable its drone and missile attacks on Ukraine.
- In response, China’s deputy UN ambassador, Geng Shuang, said China did not start the war in Ukraine, is not a party to the conflict, has never provided lethal weapons, and has always “strictly controlled dual-use materials, including the export of drones”. Geng also urged the US to “stop shifting blame” in the conflict.
- The European Parliament is considering proposals to speed up the European Union’s phasing out of Russian gas by one year, to January 2027, the Reuters news agency reported, as officials in Brussels prepare to negotiate a legally-binding ban.
- Russia-backed Indian oil refiner Nayara Energy has named Sergey Denisov as its new chief executive, after the firm’s previous CEO, Alessandro des Dorides, resigned following European Union sanctions that targeted the company, Reuters reports.
Ceasefire
- Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he may speak to Trump and President Putin this week to see if a leaders’ meeting in Istanbul is possible to discuss a ceasefire in Ukraine.
- Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said a summit between Putin and Zelenskyy could only happen as a final step to seal a peace deal, adding that it was unlikely that such a meeting could occur by the end of August, as Ukraine had proposed.
Politics and diplomacy
- Ukraine’s top anticorruption investigator Semen Kryvonos said he did not expect attempts to derail his agency’s work to end, despite an abrupt U-turn by Zelenskyy on curbing the independence of two anticorruption agencies that fuelled rare wartime protests. Kryvonos said he was taken aback by those attempts.
- Trump said he would like to maintain the limits on US and Russian strategic nuclear weapons deployments set in the 2010 New START agreement, which expires in February. Trump made the comments as he exited the White House on a trip to Scotland.
Regional developments
- Georgia hosted major multinational military exercises with NATO troops, despite its government facing growing accusations of drifting away from a pro-Western path and edging closer to Russia’s orbit amid the war in Ukraine.
