Russia Ukraine war latest: Dead Putin soldiers line road into Ukrainian village recaptured by Kyiv

The road into the liberated Ukrainian village of Storozheve, recaptured from Russian forces last week, is lined with the corpses of Russian soldiers and burnt-out armoured vehicles, reported Reuters.

Some corpses of the dead Russian soldiers remain on the dusty ground beside the husks of their vehicles when Reuters journalists reached the village yesterday. Others were found dumped crumpled in the grass and fields nearby where they died.

“Three days ago we liberated the village of Storozheve. You can see for yourselves how it was achieved. You can see the destroyed hardware. Glory to Ukraine,” a Ukrainian soldier who gave his name only as Artem told Reuters in Storozheve.

The grim landscape bears witness to the ferocity of fighting as Ukrainian troops recaptured Storozheve – which had been held by Russia since March last year – and several other villages in the past few days as part of a counteroffensive in southern and eastern Ukraine.

A senior Russian official said on Thursday it was too soon to assess agricultural losses in Russian-controlled areas from the breaching of Ukraine‘s Kakhovka dam, state news agency TASS said.

The dam burst flooded huge areas of Kherson region, one of four that Russia claimed last year as its own territory after launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“Unfortunately, we cannot yet estimate the total amount of losses for agriculture. We need all the water to drain. And then we will be able to understand which farmers have suffered this damage and to what extent,” TASS quoted Deputy Prime Minister Victoria Abramchenko as saying.

Russian forces control about 18% of the territory of Ukraine, one of the world’s leading grain producers. A majority of countries at the United Nations General Assembly have rejected the annexations as illegal.

TASS quoted Abramchenko as saying the flood would not affect Russia‘s crop forecasts overall.

Ukraine and Russia have accused each other of blowing up the dam in the early hours of June 6.

The breach of the Kakhovka dam will not affect Russia‘s crop forecasts, state-owned news agency TASS cited Russian Deputy Prime Minister Viktoria Abramchenko as saying on Thursday.

Belarus has started taking the delivery of Russian tactical nuclear weapons, president Alexander Lukashenko announced, claiming that some of these were three times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Mr Lukashenko said that “the bombs are three times more powerful than those (dropped on) Hiroshima and Nagasaki”, adding to his previous statement that he didn’t simply ask Mr Putin for the weapons, but “demanded” them.

The Vladimir Putin ally was speaking to the Russian state TV channel Rossiya-1 on a road in a forest clearing with military vehicles and a storage facility visible in the background seen around him.

Norway and Denmark have agreed to donate an additional 9,000 rounds of artillery to Ukraine, the Norwegian Ministry of Defence (MoD) said in a statement today.

Norway will provide the shells, while Denmark will donate fuses and propellant charges, the Norwegian ministry said.

The Russian mercenary Wagner group chief’s rhetoric is “evolving into defiance” as he continues to lock horns with the Kremlin over the contract signing controversy, the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) said.

Earlier this month, the Russian defence ministry demanded that members of “volunteers formations” such as Wagner Group sign contracts directly with the MoD. The move was explicitly endorsed by president Vladimir Putin on television on Tuesday this week.

“For several months, Wagner owner Yevgeny Prigozhin has been aiming vitriolic criticism at the MoD hierarchy but deferred to Putin’s authority,” the British ministry said in its intelligence update today.

It added that despite Putin’s comments, a day later Prigozhin said that, “none of Wagner’s fighters are ready to go down the path of shame again. That’s why they will not sign the contracts”.

“Prigozhin’s rhetoric is evolving into defiance of broader sections of the Russian establishment. 01 July 2023, the deadline for the volunteers to sign contracts, is likely to be a key way-point in the feud,” the British MoD said.

Japan is in talks to provide artillery shells to the United States to bolster stocks for Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russia, the Wall Street Journal reported today.

It added that the Asian ally is considering supplying 155-mm artillery shells under a 2016 agreement to share ammunition as part of its long-standing security alliance with the US, the paper added, citing people familiar with the matter.

War-torn Ukraine is reeling from the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka hydroelectric dam, which saw its reservoir burst causing chaos for miles around.

The water in the reservoir feeds a wide area of southern Ukrainian farmland, including the annexed peninsula of Crimea, as well as providing all-important cooling water to the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, lying nearby as indicated on the map below.

Russian forces are losing almost nine times more soldiers than Ukraine, the war-hit country’s deputy defence minister said on Telegram, adding that during the offensive, the Ukrainian army has suffered many times less losses compared to the “invaders”.

In Khortytsia, the Bakhmut direction, “the enemy has 8.73 times more dead, almost nine times five times”, she said on Telegram last night, sharing the data for the past week.

On the other heavy fighting axis in the war along “Tavriya” towards Zaporizhia and Berdyansk directions, Russia’s casualties were “5.3 times more than ours”, the deputy defence minister said.

“I want to remind you that during a war, neither side publishes accurate data on their losses, because this can be used by the enemy to predict the enemy’s future actions on the battlefield,” Ms Malyar said.

Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov denied reports of the killing of one of his senior commanders in fighting in Ukraine, who he said was found alive and well.

Delimkhanov was “alive and well and not even wounded”, Kadyrov said on Telegram. He has led Chechnya since 2007 and is a close ally of Vladimir Putin.

Initial reports by Russia’s Zvezda television channel cited the parliamentary press service as saying Delimkhanov had been wounded in Ukraine. It followed rumours on Ukrainian social media channels that the Chechen commander had been killed in an artillery strike in southern Ukraine.

The commander, Adam Delimkhanov, heads the Chechen division of the Russian national guard and is also a member of Russia’s parliament. He is widely seen as the Caucasian region’s second most senior official after Kadyrov himself.

Kadyrov added that he had known Delimkhanov was uninjured from the start of what he called “a fake information attack”, but had remained silent in order to embarrass Ukrainian media outlets that reported on the commander’s alleged injury.

In a later posting on Telegram, Kadyrov mocked the Ukrainian media reports about Delimkhanov for “brazen lies about his elimination”.

Kadyrov said he had been “temporarily” unable to communicate with Delimkhanov while he was in Ukraine.
Delimkhanov, who has an active social media presence with over half a million followers on Telegram, has not commented so far.