Russian forces have taken most of Sievierodonetsk, where fierce street fighting continues after a fire broke out at the Azot chemical plant, where hundreds of civilians are sheltering. “The key tactical goal of the occupiers has not changed: they are pressing in Sievierodonetsk, severe fighting is ongoing there – literally for every metre,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address, adding that Russia’s military was trying to deploy reserve forces to the Donbas region. Ukrainian troops reportedly remain in control of an industrial area.
Russia’s defence ministry said its cruise missiles destroyed a large depot containing US and European weapons in Ternopil in western Ukraine on Sunday. The strike destroyed a “large depot of anti-tank missile systems, portable air defence systems and shells provided to the Kyiv regime by the US and European countries”, the ministry said, a claim disputed by Ukrainian officials who said no weapons were stored there. Ternopil’s regional governor said the attack destroyed a number of residential buildings and injured 22 people, including seven women and a 12-year-old.
Russian forces destroyed a bridge connecting the embattled eastern city of Sievierodonetsk to its twin city of Lysychansk, cutting off a possible evacuation route for civilians, according to local officials. Serhiy Haidai, the governor of Luhansk province, said on Sunday that the Russian military had destroyed a bridge over the Siverskyi River that linked the two cities.
Amnesty International has accused Russia of war crimes in Ukraine’s second largest city of Kharkiv. Hundreds of civilians have been killed by indiscriminate Russian shelling using widely banned cluster munitions and inherently inaccurate rockets, the agency said in a new report published on Monday. “Russian forces launched a relentless campaign of indiscriminate bombardments against Kharkiv. They shelled residential neighbourhoods almost daily, killing and injuring hundreds of civilians and causing wholesale destruction, often using widely banned cluster munitions.”
Security concerns raised by Turkey in its opposition to Finland’s and Sweden’s Nato membership applications are legitimate, Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg said. “These are legitimate concerns. This is about terrorism, it’s about weapons exports,” Stoltenberg told a news conference in Finland on Sunday.
The bodies of many Ukrainian fighters killed during the siege of the Azovstal steelworks in the southern city of Mariupol are still awaiting retrieval, the former commander of Ukraine’s Azov National Guard regiment said on Sunday.
A former British soldier has died fighting Russian forces in Sievierodonetsk. The British Foreign Office confirmed Jordan Gatley was shot and killed in Ukraine. He left the British army in March “to continue his career as a soldier in other areas” and had been helping Ukrainian troops defend their country against Russia, his father, Dean, wrote in a statement posted on Facebook.
Friends and family of Brahim Saadoun – the 21-year-old Moroccan sentenced to death alongside two Britons last week – have called for his freedom, telling the Guardian he was an active-duty marine and not a mercenary, as claimed by Russian media and pro-Russia officials in eastern Ukraine who announced the sentence.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced on Sunday the possibility of new talks with Russian president Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy. “Perhaps in the next week, we will talk about what steps we will take, by holding talks with both Mr Putin and Zelenskiy,” he said in regards to solutions for impeded exports as a result of the war.
The global nuclear arsenal is expected to grow in the coming years for the first time since the cold war, and the risk of such weapons being used is the greatest in decades, a leading conflict and armaments thinktank said. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and western support for Kyiv has heightened tensions among the world’s nine nuclear-armed states, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Ukraine has established two routes through Poland and Romania to export grain and avert a global food crisis, although bottlenecks have slowed the supply chain, Kyiv’s deputy foreign minister said on Sunday.
Global trade ministers gathered to tackle food security threatened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at a World Trade Organization meeting on Sunday. Ministers are expected to agree on a joint declaration on strengthening food security in which they will “commit to take concrete steps to facilitate trade and improve the functioning and longterm resilience of global markets for food and agriculture”.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen called for the need to strengthen anti-corruption laws in Ukraine. After meeting with Zelenskiy, von der Leyen said: “There still needs to be reforms implemented, to fight corruption for example, or to modernise the administration, which will also help attract investors.”
The British defence company QinetiQ will supply Ukraine with 10 Talon sapper robots for de-mining purposes, Ukrainian authorities announced on Sunday. The first deputy head of Ukraine’s patrol police, Oleksiy Biloshitsky, said: “Talon will be deployed to de-mine Ukraine. This is a sapper robot that not only locates ‘gifts’ but also neutralises them. Before the war we had already had more than a dozen of them, now QinetiQ will deliver 10 more.”
McDonald’s restaurants opened their doors in Moscow under new Russian ownership and a new name, Vkusno & Tochka, which translates to “Tasty and that’s it”. The reopenings took place on Russia Day, a holiday celebrating national pride.