Russia captures village in eastern Ukraine near lithium deposit, Russian-backed official says
MOSCOW, June 26 (Reuters) - Russian troops have taken control of a village in eastern Ukraine which is close to a lithium deposit after fierce resistance from Ukrainian forces, a Russian-backed official said on Thursday.
The village of Shevchenko is located in Donetsk, one of four Ukrainian regions - in addition to Crimea - that Moscow has claimed as its own territory in annexations that Kyiv and Western powers reject as illegal.
The Russian Defence Ministry announced earlier on Thursday that Shevchenko had been taken along with another settlement called Novoserhiivka.
Reuters could not independently confirm the battlefield report and there was no immediate comment from Ukraine. Open source mapping from Deep State, an authoritative Ukrainian military blogging resource, showed Shevchenko under Russian control.
Soviet geologists who discovered the lithium deposit there in 1982 suggested it could be significant. It sits at a depth that would allow commercial mining, and Russian-backed officials have suggested it will be developed when the situation permits.
"The village of Shevchenko, which is located on the border with the Dnipropetrovsk region, is another settlement that has a lithium deposit. This was one of the reasons why the Ukrainian armed forces sent a huge number of their soldiers to hold it," Igor Klimakovsky, a Russian-appointed official in Donetsk, was cited by the state TASS news agency as saying on Thursday.
The Ukrainian Geological Survey says the deposit is located on Shevchenko's eastern outskirts and covers an area of nearly 40 hectares.
Parts of the Russian press incorrectly claimed in January that the Shevchenko deposit had already been captured, confusing it with the seizure of another settlement of the same name elsewhere.
Lithium is a coveted global resource because of its use in a host of industries and technologies from mobile phones to electric cars. Ukraine has reserves of about 500,000 tons, and Russia has double that, according to U.S. government estimates.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Sun
33 minutes ago
- The Sun
Haunting moment cops raid mass live BURIAL rescuing cult followers who'd been wrapped like mummies & entombed in graves
THIS is the haunting moment cops raided a mass live burial to rescue cult followers wrapped like mummies and entombed in graves. Police in Russia raided a bizarre shamanic ritual in which two young women were 'buried alive'. 9 9 9 The pair with heads wrapped like mummies had to be dug out of the graves in a forest in Leningrad region. Both were alive after their ordeals. One had difficulty standing up when she was dug out. Thirteen more worshippers were gathered around a fire, some waiting to be buried after digging their own graves. The self-styled shaman named Timur and his female assistant Yekaterina Koroleva were both detained on suspicion of running a sinister cult. First, the shaman was ordered to dig out the two women from their 20-inch deep graves. Koroleva - organiser of the ritual - denied that the participants had paid almost £80 to die in the graves, and claimed their heads were not completely buried, allowing them to breathe. 'The essence of the ritual is essentially a kind of reset,' she said. 'It's a psychological trance ceremony where a person undergoes a complete reboot, a full cleansing. 'If someone has gone through certain life events, or wants to be completely reborn, to fully change their life — they opt for this extreme form of burial.' Watch moment rape cult leader who told followers he was an alien called Great Shaman is arrested in Argentina Reports said participants were wrapped in rags and buried alive as part of a supposed rebirth or symbolic encounter with Hel, the Norse goddess of death. Law enforcement were deciding how to proceed against the detained pair. They could face up to seven years in jail, reported Novye Izvestia news outlet. A shaman is a person believed to have access to, and influence in, the world of spirits, typically through rituals, visions, and healing practices. This comes as a Russian rape cult leader who called himself an alien named Great Shaman was arrested in Argentina. Konstantin Rudnev, 57, was handcuffed and dragged away by cops at Bariloche Airport as he attempted to flee to Brazil with six women. Video shows the twisted guru — who once claimed to be a god from the star Sirius — being busted in a dramatic operation that saw 14 suspects snared at two airports over 1,000 miles apart in a joint swoop by Argentine authorities. Rudnev — already convicted of rape and running a violent sex cult in Russia — reportedly tried to slit his throat with a razor as officers closed in, according to El Pais. 9 9 9 He was reportedly treated for his injuries and was pictured with a bandage around his neck. He now faces fresh charges of human trafficking, sexual exploitation and drug offences, more than a decade after he was jailed for 11 years in Siberia for a string of abuse crimes involving female followers. The bizarre cult, Ashram Shambala, founded in 1989 in Novosibirsk, brainwashed followers — mostly women — into surrendering their property. They would reportedly cut ties with loved ones and take part in so-called "ritual orgies" in exchange for "salvation." Women were allegedly coerced into sex with Rudnev — while male followers were ordered to remain celibate. The cult even flogged recordings of the encounters to fund operations and promised spiritual enlightenment via 'women's practices' and Eastern esotericism. 9 9
Reuters
an hour ago
- Reuters
UN chief warns 80-year-old founding charter 'not an a la carte menu'
UNITED NATIONS, June 26 (Reuters) - United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned on Thursday that the U.N. Charter was under assault like never before as the 193-member world body marked the 80th anniversary of the signing of its founding document. "We see an all too familiar pattern: Follow when the Charter suits, ignore when it does not. The Charter of the United Nations is not optional. It is not an a la carte menu. It is the bedrock of international relations," Guterres said. Countries regularly accuse each other of breaching the Charter, but few face concrete consequences. In recent years Russia and Israel have been called out by the General Assembly for violating the Charter with their wars in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip, respectively. Both conflicts still rage. In the past week, Iran accused the United States of violating the Charter with its strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and the U.S. justified them under the Charter as self-defense. The United Nations was born out of the end of World War Two and the Charter was signed in San Francisco by an initial 50 states on June 26, 1945. It came into force four months later with the aim of saving succeeding generations from war and upholding human dignity and the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small. While the United Nations had done a lot of good over the past eight decades, senior U.S. diplomat McCoy Pitt said the world body should not "overlook the shortcomings that limit the UN's potential." "We regret that the U.N. has lost sight of its founding mission. In this regard, wars still rage on multiple continents," he said. "The principles of the UN Charter must remain at the heart of this institution, not just as an agreement for a better world, but also as a continuing call to action."
Times
an hour ago
- Times
Why payments to pregnant schoolgirls is dividing Putin's pronatalists
President Putin is determined to reverse Russia's 'disastrous' population slump but the country's latest counter measure may be the most controversial yet — cash payments for schoolgirl pregnancies. Rules introduced in at least ten regions since March mean teenage mothers who are still at school will be given one-off payments of 100,000 roubles (£900) for their first birth. There is no minimum age requirement of the mother to receive the payments. The legal age of consent in Russia is 16. Critics are outraged at the promotion of risky and socially challenging births, while defenders of the initiative claim it is genuine aid to vulnerable young mothers. The measure is part of a package pushed forward under Putin, who is concerned by a new decline in the populace, which experts blame in part on his invasion of Ukraine. In recent years, Russia has increased financial incentives for new mothers, banned 'child-free propaganda' and placed restrictions on abortion and divorce as it battles to avert a demographic crisis. In tune with this pronatalist spirit, a popular reality show on Russian television recently changed its name from 'Pregnant at 16' to 'Mama at 16'. The payments are granted before birth, in some regions as early as the 12th week of pregnancy, in others after 22 weeks. The extension of payments to school-age mothers has angered some pro-Kremlin politicians and activists. 'When a child gives birth to another child it's not something to be encouraged; it's not a reason for pride or heroism,' Kseniya Goryachova, a Russian MP, told colleagues in parliament. If girls were made to think 'it doesn't matter how old you are, give birth, we'll pay' then, 'This is not care. This is very harmful propaganda,' Goryachova added. Experts warned the measure may simply be ineffective. John Ermisch, an emeritus professor of family demography at Oxford University, said that financial incentives to give birth usually did not have a long-term effect. 'You get a short spike, then a decline,' he told BBC News Russian. But Andrei Klychkov, the governor of Orel, one of the regions taking part in the trial, defended the payments, saying they should be seen not as rewards but as 'social support' for teenage girls 'in a difficult real-life situation' after getting pregnant. Political commentators say the Kremlin is pushing such policies because a falling population undermines Putin's muscular rhetoric about the country 'getting off its knees' and rising to meet its enemies. 'Putin understands that, in the world of tomorrow, Russia will be a territorial giant and population dwarf,' the analysts Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes concluded in a recent report. Russia's population plummeted from 148.6 million in 1993 to 142.7 million in 2009 as mortality rose and fertility rates dipped. Poverty, alcoholism, poor diet and accidents took their toll in the post-Soviet collapse, while many young Russians were financially unable to support raising a family. From 2009, the trend was bucked as relative prosperity increased with Russia's oil and gas boom, and by 2022 the population was back to 147 million. However, it has since fallen again, to an estimated 146.1 million this year. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers dying in Ukraine, an exodus of young people opposed to the war — or not keen to fight in it — and cuts to inward migration are thought to have added to the latest drop in population. Those factors seem to have offset the number of 'citizens' that Russia says it acquired when it annexed Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine. • Janice Turner: Pronatalism will bring votes but not babies Meanwhile, birth rates are on the slide again. According to data released by Rosstat, the state statistics agency, 195,400 children were born in Russia during January and February 2025 — a 3 per cent drop compared to the same period in 2024. Last year, Russia recorded 1.2 million births, the lowest annual total since 1999. Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has called the situation 'disastrous' and such statistics have prompted unusual suggestions from Russian officials desperate to stop the rot. In March, Yevgeny Rudenko, a councillor from the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia in Kaluga region, urged women to wear skimpy clothes in hot weather, and said that in the Seventies 'everyone wore mini-skirts, marriages were strong, and families were being created'. 'Because of modesty, women are getting married less often,' Rudenko added. 'Only gay men don't like women in mini-skirts.' In September, Yevgeny Shestopalov, a regional health minister, urged Russians to have sex during the working day. 'Being very busy at work is not a valid reason, but a lame excuse,' he said. 'You can engage in procreation during breaks, because life flies by too quickly.'
