WAR IN UKRAINE: June 16, 2023
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS: Day 478
On Friday Kyiv came under attack - just as African leaders began a visit on a peace mission. Mayor Vitaliy Klychko said on Telegram there’s been an explosion in the Podilsky district, and more rockets were on the way. During the air alert, defense forces said they previously destroyed 12 missiles and two reconnaissance drones. My take: the leaders will able to personally thank Mr. Putin for the show of force when they meet with him tomorrow in St. Petersburg
The South African president’s security team has been stuck on a plane in Poland for several hours. Authorities are reportedly refusing to allow them & accompanying journalists to disembark and continue their journey to Ukraine where Cyril Ramaphosa is leading the peace mission by African heads of states. The SAA chartered flight with more than 120 people on board reportedly landed in Warsaw's Chopin Airport early on Thursday afternoon. Ramaphosa’s head of security said the Polish government was sabotaging the president’s security by not allowing them to disembark - BBC
Ukrainian counteroffensive operations are underway, and it's been hard fighting for Kyiv's forces. But Ukraine is still miles from Russia's main line of defense, and a tougher fight is probably still to come, experts say. Ukrainian forces appear to be about 10 to 15 kilometers from the main defensive line, depending on the location of the fighting, George Barros, a Russia analyst who is the geospatial-intelligence team lead at the Institute for the Study of War, told Insider. Jack Watling, a land-warfare expert at the Royal United Services Institute, suggested it could be as much as 20 kilometers. Ukraine has been fighting its way through Russian defensive positions consisting of foxholes and hand-dug trenches backed by minefields and protected by drones and artillery, Watling wrote in an article published Wednesday. But that is not the main line of defense - Business Insider
An International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) mission led by the head of the UN nuclear watchdog, Rafael Grossi, arrived at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant on June 15 for an inspection amid growing concerns about the safety of Europe's largest nuclear station.
Russia launched another series of air strikes on Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk region early on June 15 as an air-raid alert was again declared across the country.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged Switzerland to allow the reexport of war materiel to Ukraine, saying the move would be vital in combating the Russian invasion - RFE/RL
The operation of the “Grain Corridor” has not changed fundamentally. Currently, it is not even dozens, it is just a few ships that leave and enter the port of Odesa these days. Serhii Bratchuk, Head of the Public Council under the Odesa Oblast Military Administration, made this statement during a briefing at Media Center Ukraine. “We see that the russian federation continues to effectively block the work of the “Grain Corridor.” The volumes of work are nowhere near to the ones back in January of this year,” he noted. Serhii Bratchuk noted that many ships are waiting in line to be loaded. In addition, he pointed out how many ships enter and leave the port of Odesa every day. “It depends on the behavior of the russian federation’s team in this joint coordination group. It happens in different ways – sometimes it’s 1, 2, 3 ships. We are talking about just a few, not dozens of ships. There are a lot of ships waiting in line to be loaded.”
Required reading…
In the early morning hours of June 6, an explosion destroyed the dam of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station on the Dnipro river. Seismic datacollected by Norway show clear signals of an explosion at the time of the dam’s collapse. The event has far-reaching consequences that cannot be adequately tabulated but will be massively harmful into the foreseeable future, affecting Ukraine’s economy, agricultural sector, environment, and power systems, though foremost the lives and livelihoods of Ukrainian people.
These consequences are worsened by the Russian occupation. Russian forces captured the plant on February 24, 2022, the first day of the full-scale invasion, and in the fall of 2022 the Russian military mined the dam. Kyiv intelligence had learned of the Russians' intention to blow up the dam, and issued warnings to international community. It is already obvious that the dam explosion in conjunction with summer heating of the land, which has produced spontaneous combustion of mines, will be one of the biggest disasters in Europe of the past few decades.
Read the full Wilson Center analysis here