June 30, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news

Russian forces have left Snake Island in the Black Sea, the Ukrainian Armed Forces said Thursday, after they carried out what they said was a “successful” operation.

On Monday, the Ukrainian military said it hit a second missile system on the island, as well as multiple Russian personnel in their efforts to keep them at bay.

In a short post on Telegram the Operation Command South on Thursday, the Ukrainian Armed Forces said that “the enemy hastily evacuated the remnants of the garrison in two speedboats and probably left the island.”

Andriy Yermak, Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, said in a Telegram post that Ukraine's armed forces had "conducted a remarkable operation."

Early on Thursday Ukrainian Armed Forces said the results of an overnight operation were being assessed, but were viewed as a “success” as Russian forces were forced to evacuate using speedboats.

The Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Valeriy Zaluzhniy, said on Telegram that the "occupiers" had left after being “unable to withstand the fire of our artillery, missile and air strikes."

He also thanked the Ukrainian Armed Forces from the Odesa region “who took the maximum measures to liberate a strategically important part of our territory,” referring to Snake Island.

However, Russia gave a slightly different narrative of the events on the island.

Lieutenant General of the Russian Armed Forces, and spokesperson of the Russian army, Igor Konashenkov said at a briefing that Russian forces left the island "as a gesture of goodwill."

He added that “the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation finished fulfilling the assigned tasks in Snake Island and withdrew the garrison that had been operating there.”

Konashenkov intimated that the removal of Russian troops should allow an easing for the passage of grain, “this solution will prevent Kyiv from speculating on an impending grocery crisis citing the inability to export grain due to total control of the northwestern part of the Black Sea by Russia.”

Some context: Snake Island is a small but strategic island in the Black Sea. It was the scene of one of the opening salvos of the war in Ukraine, with demands from a Russian warship calling for the Ukrainian defenders to surrender, who boldly replied with “Russian warship go f*** yourself.”

This post has been updated.

The bombing of the mall in Kremenchuk, central Ukraine, “should be investigated as a potential war crime,” Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Thursday.

In a report published on Thursday, Yulia Gorbunova, a senior Ukraine researcher at HRW added that “if the Russian authorities don’t, the International Criminal Court and other investigative bodies should.”

In a thorough report into the bombing, HRW spoke with 15 people to publish their report, including the injured, doctors, mall staff, other witnesses and local officials.

Gorbunova added “the civilians of Kremenchuk who suffered such an intense loss from June 27 strike, deserve justice. There needs to be a thorough investigation, and those responsible should be held to account.”

Having a neighbor like Russia at the end of the street means 59-year-old Vytas Grudzinskas doesn't get much rest. "I can see the soldiers best at night," he says, pointing to a patch of green behind his neighbor's garden.

"They have a shooting range they use over there behind that field. In the afternoon, you can hear the guns," he said.

Grudzinskas has his own weapon, a machine gun, which he keeps locked in a cupboard, close at hand — although his guard dog, a Maltese terrier, might be less effective in battle.

The small city of Kybartai where Grudzinska lives lies inside both NATO and the European Union but also along one of the world's hottest borders — the Suwalki corridor. This tract of land, about 60 miles wide, is sandwiched between Russia's heavily fortified, nuclear-armed, Baltic bolthole of Kaliningrad and its ally, Belarus.

The pass — viewed by many analysts as a weak point within NATO — is caught in a pincer grip between Kremlin troops. The fear is that if Ukraine fell, Russia would advance through it next, possibly cutting off the Baltic states in days.

The scars of Soviet occupation run deep in this part of Europe. Tens of thousands of Lithuanians were forcibly deported to gulags in Siberia and the far north by the Soviets in the 1940s and 1950s. Almost 30,000 Lithuanian prisoners perished in the forced labor camps.

So, when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Grudzinskas joined Lithuania's century-old volunteer militia — the Riflemen — and took up arms in his own backyard.

Read the full story here.

Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a fresh warning over Finland and Sweden's bids to join NATO, saying while Russia was not bothered if the two countries joined the bloc, it would "respond symmetrically" to any military or infrastructure build up.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said 10 Russian missiles hit "civilian targets" in the southern city of Mykolaiv on Wednesday, killing at least five people.

"There were also strikes at Ochakiv, Dnipro, the Russian shelling of the Kharkiv region, Sumy region, Donbas."

Zelensky also said the situation in Lysychansk, Avdiivka, and communities in the Bakhmut direction "remains extremely brutal, very difficult."

"We are doing everything we can to provide our military with modern artillery systems to respond properly to the occupiers," he said.

Some context: Mykolaiv mayor Oleksandr Sienkevych on Wednesday said there were "only 18 days" since the start of the invasion that the southern Ukrainian city was not fired upon with missiles or cluster shells.

More than 114 residents had died due to Russian attacks in that time, he said. It was not clear if that number included all casualties cited by Zelensky later that day.

The US intelligence community assesses that it will take “years” for the Russian military to recover from the damage it has sustained in carrying out its war in Ukraine, according to the director for national intelligence Avril Haines.

That could push Russia to become more reliant on "asymmetric tools" such as cyberattacks, efforts to try to control energy, or even nuclear weapons in order to project "power and influence," she said.

Grim assessment: Haines said Russia is beginning to turn its focus to the Donetsk region. The intelligence community believes Russia will struggle to overtake the eastern province — as it is close to achieving in neighboring Luhansk — but that Russian President Vladimir Putin likely believes time is on Moscow's side because he thinks the West will eventually tire of supporting Ukraine.

Three scenarios: Haines said the intelligence community sees three likely scenarios that could come into focus in the coming weeks and months.

“The most likely is that the conflict remains a grinding struggle in which the Russians make incremental gains, but no breakthrough,” she said. Under that scenario, the Russian military will have secured Luhansk and much of Donetsk by the fall, as well as solidifying control of southern Ukraine.

The other scenarios are that Russia could achieve a breakthrough and refocus on Kyiv or Odesa; or, finally, that Ukraine could stabilize the front line and begin to make smaller gains, likely in Kherson or elsewhere in southern Ukraine.

Latvian Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš hailed the decisions made by NATO leaders in Madrid to bolster its presence on the alliance's eastern flank, calling it a "very, very clear signal to Moscow."

In an interview with CNN Wednesday, the Baltic state leader noted that "in a sense, everything that we've been arguing for has been clearly heard," saying the change in posture is "a change from a tripwire defense to a forward defense."

Kariņš said he would like to see support for Ukraine move even more quickly, because "the faster we in NATO can provide weapons, munitions and training, the sooner the war will come to an end."

Some context: Speaking at the NATO summit in Madrid on Wednesday, President Joe Biden said the United States would establish a permanent headquarters for the Fifth Army Corps in Poland and enhance rotational deployments to the Baltic states. Latvia is one of the Baltic states, and shares land borders with both Russia and Belarus.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin says Russia is not bothered if Sweden and Finland join NATO but warns they will respond in kind to any “threats.”

Putin added, however, that the NATO expansion would bring "tensions."

NATO expansion: Sweden and Finland are set formally to end decades of neutrality and join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), in a historic breakthrough for the alliance that deals a blow to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The last major hurdle to the two nations' entry to the bloc was removed when Turkey dropped its opposition on Tuesday. 

That breakthrough came during a NATO summit in Madrid that has already become one of the most consequential meetings in the history of the military alliance.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday denied that Russia was behind a strike on a shopping center in Kremenchuk, central Ukraine, that left at least 18 dead and dozens missing and wounded.  

"The Russian army does not attack any civilian site. We don’t have the need for this. We have every capability to detect specific locations; and thanks to our high-precision long-range weapons we are achieving our goals,” Putin said, at a news conference following a meeting of the "Caspian five" leaders — Russia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan — in Ashgabat. 

More background: On its Telegram channel, the Russian Defense Ministry earlier said Russian "Aerospace Forces launched a strike with high-precision air-based weapons on hangars with weapons and ammunition received from the United States and European countries," hitting a plant of "road machines."

The ministry blamed "the detonation of stored ammunition for Western weapons" for causing a fire in what it described as a "non-functioning" neighboring shopping mall.

Video from Kremenchuk shows that a shopping mall in the heart of the city was obliterated by one of the two missiles that were fired. Despite an air raid siren, dozens of people were still inside the mall when the missile struck.

It's unclear what "road machine" plant the Russian Defense Ministry is referring to.