Split
On Sunday morning, Russia will attack southern Ukraine: the situation in the news ticker on July 31.
- Several cities under attack: Kharkiv also affected
- Attack on Sunday night: Alarm in Mykolaiv
- New Details on Annexations: Representatives from Russia visit occupied territories
- Editor’s note: You can read all the news about the Ukraine conflict in this news ticker. Some of the information comes from warring factions in the Ukraine war and cannot be checked directly and independently.
+++ 07.00 a.m.: Thermobaric weapons, also known as vacuum bombs, may have been used in the attack on the camp for Ukrainian prisoners of war in Olenivka on Friday (July 29). The news portal Nexta reports that the damage to the building points to this. For example, a crater caused by a suspected rocket impact is missing. The Russian government subsequently claimed that a multiple rocket launcher of the “HIMARS” type was responsible. The US had recently delivered these to Ukraine. Ex-military man Thomas C. Theiner contradicted the claim from Moscow in a statement on Twitter. “Had a HIMAR hit, the building would be in ruins. However, the masonry is mostly still intact,” says Theimer. None of the above information can be independently verified.
+++ 6.30 a.m.: US fighter jets are to be stationed in Poland to support NATO’s “air shield” mission. The news portal reports Nexta.
News about the Ukraine war: Shelling reported in Kharkiv
+++ 06.00 a.m.: Russian shelling was also reported in Kharkiv on Sunday morning. Mayor Ihor Terekhov confirmed around 4:40 a.m. that numerous buildings were damaged. Apparently, this affects the Nemyschlianskyi district, like the news portal Kyiv Independent reported.
+++ 5.30 a.m.: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called for people to flee Donetsk. The Russian army is attacking the entire Donbass, he said in a video speech.
News about the Ukraine war: Russia attacks Mykolaiv at night
Update from Sunday, July 31, 5:00 a.m.: The city of Mykolaiv is apparently under fire again in the night to Sunday and in the morning hours. As the mayor announced, there were several explosions in the city area. These were caused by cluster munitions, said Oleksandr Sienkevych, according to a report by the news portal Kyiv Independent. Sienkevych called on the civilian population of Mykolayiv to go to shelters. The information cannot be independently verified. However, the Russian army launched rocket attacks on the city in southern Ukraine on Saturday. Around 480,000 people live there.
+++ 7.30 p.m.: The UN wants to investigate the Russian attack that killed 50 Ukrainian prisoners of war in Olenivka. “We are ready to send an expert team that can conduct an investigation with the consent of the parties,” Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for the UN Secretary-General, told Russian media.
Meanwhile, Russian forces are storming a village near Bakhmut in the Donetsk region. According to the Ukrainian General Staff, Russian forces have achieved a partial success in the village of Semyhiria near Bakhmut in Donetsk Oblast, entrenching themselves on the outskirts of the settlement.
+++ 4:08 p.m.: After the shelling of a detention center in the village of Olenivka in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, Russian state television has released a list of the names of 50 Azov militants killed and 73 wounded. This is reported by the Ukrainian news portal Pravda. Despite efforts by the Ukrainian authorities to obtain official information on the dead and injured, there was no further report from Russia, as the Ukrainian parliament’s human rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, told the news portal.
Lubinets can currently “only see the total numbers: how many were held captive there, how many were killed, how many were injured. We can already estimate these figures reliably. But the International Committee of the Red Cross cannot give us the names of the dead and injured. Concrete information may only be passed on to the relatives.”
Attack on prison camps in Ukraine war: Pentagon warns of false information
Meanwhile, both warring factions continue to blame the other side for the attack on Friday (July 29). Against this background, however, an official briefing by the US Department of Defense called for the information from Russia to be “treated with caution, simply because we know that many of your claims in the past were far from the truth,” quoted the news portal Kyiv Independent an unnamed US military official.
+++ 2.15 p.m.: The official Twitter account of Russia’s embassy in the UK has said that members of the far-right Azov battalion, which has long resisted in Mariupol, deserve death by “hanging”. They are “not real soldiers” who deserve “a humiliating death,” the embassy said in a post. The short message service did not delete the post, but pointed out that it incited hatred and violated Twitter rules.
+++ 1.30 p.m.: The death toll after the Russian attack on the city of Mykolaiv on Friday has risen to seven. Mayor Oleksandr Sienkevych said this on Saturday, like the news portal Kyiv Independent reported. Two people died in the hospital. The number of injured is 19. This information cannot be independently verified.
News about the Ukraine war: Poland demands a “serious” offer for the exchange of armored rings
+++ 12.30 p.m.: Poland has asked Germany for a “serious” offer to exchange armored rings in order to be able to supply arms to Ukraine. It should “make a significant contribution to strengthening Polish and regional defense capacities,” wrote Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczczak in a letter to his counterpart Christine Lambrecht (SPD). The previous arms deliveries to Ukraine have left “gaps” in Poland’s defense budget. Blaszczczak emphasized that this must now be counteracted.
Poland had protested against Germany’s previous offer: It included 20 “Leopard 2” tanks to be delivered piecemeal from 2023. Defense Minister Lambrecht had justified the offer to Poland by saying that German military stocks were very small.
+++ 11.00 a.m.: According to an assessment by the British secret service, the Russian army wants to secure the supply logistics to southern Ukraine using a ferry system and pontoon bridges. Troops in certain areas are threatened with isolation due to bridge damage from Ukrainian missile attacks. This cannot be verified independently. To the background: A pontoon bridge consists of numerous small floating platforms on which, among other things, tracks can be mounted. All in all, they offer an alternative to conventional bridges over bodies of water.
News about the Ukraine war: Gazprom is turning off the gas supply to Latvia
+++ 10.15 a.m.: According to its own statements, the Russian state-owned company Gazprom has stopped deliveries to Latvia. The neighboring country violated acceptance conditions, it said in a statement. The Latvian gas supplier Latvijas Gaze had previously stated that it wanted to pay for Russian gas in euros instead of rubles. The government in Riga had also announced that it would only purchase gas from Russia until the end of the year. Neighboring Lithuania has already completely dispensed with deliveries from Gazprom.
+++ 09.45 a.m.: A covert mobilization for the army is currently underway in numerous regions of Russia. According to reports, President Putin wants to send up to 30,000 new soldiers into the Ukraine war.
+++ 09.15 a.m.: According to the Ukrainian army, it attacked Russian forces in the Kherson region. 105 Russian soldiers were killed and two ammunition depots were destroyed, it said. In addition, the military command “South” of the Ukrainian army said that the train service to Kherson via the Dnipro River had been interrupted. This would further isolate Russian troops from supplying the occupied Crimean peninsula and the East. The information cannot be independently verified.
+++ 6.30 a.m.: The International Red Cross has offered to help evacuate wounded prisoners of war from Olenivka prison. “We have requested access to assess the health of everyone who was on site at the time of the attack,” the committee said. Part of it is protective equipment, medical supplies and “forensic material,” it said. The governments in Kyiv and Moscow have so far accused each other of being responsible for the attack on the prison.
News on the Ukraine war: New details on annexations
+++ 05.45 a.m.: The US think tank Institute for the Study of War reports that representatives of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party have traveled to temporarily occupied regions of Ukraine, likely to create the conditions for an annexation or a staged “referendum”. . For weeks there have been reports that Russia wants to use the referenda mentioned to try to create a legal basis for the occupations. The think tank’s information is not independently verifiable.
News about the Ukraine war: Russia bombs Kharkiv again
First report from Saturday, July 30, 5:00 a.m.: Russian troops bombed the Kharkiv region again on Saturday night. The news portal Kyiv Independent reports, with reference to statements by the responsible governor, that among other things a school was attacked. The bombings are said to have started around 3:00 a.m. So far, nothing is known about the number of victims. The Russian military has not yet commented on the allegations. The information cannot be independently verified.
The Kremlin is planning a military counter-reaction to Sweden and Finland joining NATO. Dmitry Medvedev resigned from the agency Interfax stated that if NATO bases were to be set up on the territory of the two countries or if weapons were to be stationed, “our reaction steps would be symmetrical to them”. Medvedev is deputy chief of the Russian Security Council.
(jfw/tu/jo mit dpa/AFP)