Russia-Ukraine War: List of the most important events, day 868 | News about the Russia-Ukraine War

Here is the state of affairs as of Friday, July 12, 2024:

Battle

• The Ukrainian Air Force said it shot down five cruise missiles and 11 drones out of a total of 19 launched by Russia on Friday. Russia’s main target was the town of Starokostiantyniv, a key Ukrainian air base.
• Russian forces launched attacks in eastern and northeastern Ukraine on Thursday, killing five people, including a child, just days after the United Nations warned that attacks on civilians had become systematic, officials said.
• Five children were injured, two of them seriously, in a Ukrainian drone attack in front of a multi-storey apartment block in the southern Russian region of Belgorod, the regional governor said.
• Ukraine has seized a cargo ship near Odessa and arrested its captain. The accusation is that the ship was illegally exporting Ukrainian grain.

diplomacy

• President Joe Biden reiterated the United States’ support for Ukraine at the end of a NATO summit and said the U.S. “cannot withdraw from the world.”
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told allies at the NATO summit that they must lift all restrictions on Kyiv’s long-range attacks on targets in Russia if they wanted Ukraine to win the war.
• Zelensky also said Ukraine was “very close” to its goal of NATO membership, although the alliance had not offered his country a formal invitation to the summit.
• When introducing Zelensky, President Biden mistakenly called him “President Putin,” but then corrected himself.
• China sharply criticized a communiqué from the NATO summit, calling it an “enabler” of Russia’s war effort in Ukraine, biased and “sowing discord.”
• Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store announced at the summit that his country would donate one billion krone ($92.69 million) to support Ukraine’s air defense.
• The United Nations General Assembly called on Russia to “urgently withdraw its military and other unauthorized personnel” from Ukraine’s Zaporizhia nuclear power plant and return full control to the Ukrainian authorities.
• The Kremlin said the US plan to regularly deploy long-range missiles in Germany would lead to a Cold War-style confrontation between Russia and the West.

politics

• Russia has added opposition leader Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, to its list of “terrorists” and “extremists,” two days after issuing an arrest warrant for her.
• A Moscow court upheld a prison sentence against human rights activist Oleg Orlov, co-chair of the now-banned Memorial group, which was one of the winners of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, for his criticism of the war in Ukraine.