Here is how things stand on Tuesday, July 1:Fighting
The Russian-installed governor of the occupied Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine, Leonid Pasechnik, said that Russian troops are now in full control of the entire region.
If confirmed, that would make Luhansk the first Ukrainian region fully occupied by Russia after more than three years of war. Luhansk is one of four regions that Russia now claims as its own.
Russia’s state media and war bloggers also said that Russian forces have taken control of the first village in the central Ukrainian region of Dnipropetrovsk.
This came as Moscow-appointed officials said Ukrainian forces attacked the city of Donetsk in the Russian-occupied Donetsk region, killing at least one person, damaging several buildings and setting a market on fire.
Also in Donetsk, Russian forces have occupied one of Ukraine’s most valuable lithium deposits near the village of Shevchenko, The Kyiv Independent reported, citing Roman Pohorilyi, the founder of the open-source mapping project Deep State Map.
The Ukrainian Air Force, meanwhile, said it detected 107 Russian Shahed and decoy drones in the country’s airspace overnight, a day after the country experienced the biggest aerial attack from Russian forces since 2022.
Russian strikes in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region left two civilians dead and eight wounded, including a 6-year-old child, regional Governor Oleh Syniehubov said.
Outside the immediate region, Bloomberg reported an explosion on an oil tanker near Libya, in the latest unexplained blast on vessels that had previously called at Russian ports.
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