Ukraine war briefing: Zelenskyy ridicules Russian military drive, saying Putin keeps postponing goal deadlines

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has mocked Russia’s military drive, saying the Kremlin has set and put off 15 deadlines to ⁠capture Ukraine’s eastern Donbas ⁠region across four years. The Ukrainian president’s was responding to Vladimir Putin’s rejection a day earlier of what the Russian leader said was a Ukrainian proposal to abandon long-range strikes and ⁠scale down the fighting. He said Putin’s comments showed he was out of touch with the feelings of Russians who faced queues at petrol stations, linked to a Ukrainian campaign of ⁠strikes on oil industry targets. “Even an oil-producing state – a ‘gas station’ as Russia has often been called – is now facing ​fuel shortages,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address on Monday. “This ‌is a direct consequence of ‌the war; one of many consequences. It is also one example of how Ukraine responds – with precision, not through ‌terrorism.”

Zelenskyy also said the Kremlin had set – and later put back – 15 deadlines over the course of more than four years to capture four regions in eastern Ukraine: Donetsk and Luhansk in Donbas, and Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. “Russia’s political leadership remains obsessed with Donbas,” he said. “If Russia does not end the war, it will have to postpone that deadline once again.” Putin on Sunday said Russian forces would press ahead with their battlefield aim of ⁠fully capturing the four regions.

Russian attacks across Ukraine killed 10 people and wounded ⁠dozens on Monday, authorities said, with strikes continuing into the afternoon as the death toll climbed. A missile attack in ⁠the south-eastern city ⁠of Dnipro ​killed six people and wounded 29, the regional governor said. Zelenskyy said the strike targeted infrastructure and that rescue ⁠rescue operations were under way. A Russian drone attack on a passenger ‌minibus in Zaporizhzhia killed two men and a woman and injured eight others, including a seven-year-old boy, regional officials said. A glide bomb also hit ​the north-eastern city of Kharkiv, killing a 23-year-old woman and wounding 10 others, according to officials there.

A Russian court has said it jailed three bar workers for participating in the “international LGBT community”, in the first such case since Moscow labelled the community “extremist” in 2023. Russia has for years targeted LGBTQ+ organisations but has become even more hostile since invading Ukraine in 2022. A court in Orenburg, a city bordering Kazakhstan, said on Monday its verdict was in the “first criminal case” for “organising and participating in the activities of an extremist organisation – the international LGBT movement”. It said the owner, the administrator and art director of the Pose bar in Orenburg were found guilty of organising “events united by the theme of demonstrating solidarity with people of non-traditional sexual orientation” – the Russian legal term for LGBTQ+ people. The three would serve between two and seven years in jail and the owner would have to pay a 1m rouble ($13,000) fine, the court said.

Ukraine’s energy grid was buckling under temperatures in excess of 36C on Monday amid the European heatwave. Authorities in the western Rivne region introduced emergency power outages to ease pressure on the grid, while the central Khmelnytsky region also announced temporary outages. Five other regions – from Ivano-Frankivsk in the west to Zaporizhzhia on the frontline in the south – warned households and businesses to be prepared for blackouts on Tuesday.

A Russian army veteran who threatened Vladimir Putin with mutiny has been convicted of displaying “extremist” symbols and jailed, according to his Telegram account and court documents. The former soldier, who had reportedly served on the frontline against Ukraine, posted videos on Instagram last week calling for a meeting with Putin – alleging that many soldiers were being tortured for refusing “mindless, suicidal orders” – and threatening an army mutiny, attracting millions of views. The Kremlin said on Friday it had not yet seen the video but that it appeared to have “strange wording”. The court on Monday published only limited information confirming the case, without giving the sentence, but the soldier’s Telegram account said he was jailed for 11 days.