Russia advances to east-central Ukrainian region
Russia said Sunday that its forces had advanced to the edge of the east-central Ukrainian region of Dnipropetrovsk amid a public row between Moscow and Kyiv over peace negotiations and the return of thousands of bodies of soldiers who fell in the war.
Despite talk of peace, the war is stepping up with Russian forces grabbing more territory in Ukraine and Kyiv unfurling high-profile drone and sabotage attacks on Russia's nuclear-capable bomber fleet and, according to Moscow, on railways.
Russia, which controls a little under one-fifth of Ukrainian territory, has taken more than 190 square kilometers of the Sumy region of northeastern Ukraine in less than a month, according to pro-Ukrainian open-source maps.
Now, according to the Russian defence ministry, units of the 90th Tank Division of the Central Grouping of Russian forces have reached the western frontier of Ukraine's Donetsk region and are attacking the adjacent Dnipropetrovsk region.
"The enemy does not abandon its intentions to enter the Dnipropetrovsk region," Ukraine's Southern Defense Forces said on Telegram. "Our soldiers are courageously and professionally holding their section of the front, disrupting the occupier's plans. This work does not stop for a minute." Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chair of Russia's Security Council, said the Dnipropetrovsk offensive showed that if Ukraine did not want to accept the reality of Russia's territorial gains in peace talks, then Moscow's forces would advance further.
The pro-Ukrainian Deep State map showed Russian forces very close to the Dnipropetrovsk region, which had a population of more than 3 million before the war, and advancing on the city of Kostyantynivka in the Donetsk region from several directions.
A Ukrainian military spokesperson, Dmytro Zaporozhets, said that Russian forces were trying to "build a bridgehead for an attack" on Kostyantynivka, an important logistical hub for the Ukrainian army.
Russia on Saturday accused Ukraine of delaying the swap of prisoners of war and the return of the bodies of 12,000 dead soldiers. Ukraine denied those claims.
On Sunday, Russia said it was moving bodies towards the border and television showed refrigerated trucks containing the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers on the road in the Bryansk region.
Ukraine, officials said, was playing politics with the dead.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pledged to press on with prisoner exchanges.
"The Russian side is therefore, like always, even in these matters, is trying to play some kind of dirty political and information game," he said in his nightly video address.
"We believe that the exchanges will continue and will do everything for this. If the Russians do not stand by agreements even in humanitarian matters, it casts great doubt on all international efforts — including those by the United States in terms of talks and diplomacy."
Zelenskyy said he had reviewed commanders' reports about areas hit by heavy fighting, including near Pokrovsk, targeted by Moscow for months. He said the situation was "far from easy, but everything depends on the resilience of our units." US President Donald Trump, who says he wants an end to the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II, on Thursday likened it to a fight between young children and indicated that he might have to simply let the conflict play out.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that he did not think Ukraine's leaders wanted peace, after accusing them of ordering a bombing in Bryansk, western Russia, that killed seven people and injured 115 a day before talks in Turkey.
Ukraine, which has not commented on the attack on a Bryansk bridge, has similarly accused Moscow of not seriously seeking peace, citing Russian resistance to an immediate ceasefire.
Russia is demanding international recognition of Crimea, a peninsula it annexed from Ukraine in 2014, and four other regions of Ukraine that Moscow has claimed as its own territory.
Ukraine would have to withdraw its forces from all of them.
Russia controlled 113,273 square kilometers, or 18.8 percent, of Ukrainian territory as of June 7, according to the Deep State map. That is an area bigger than the U.S. state of Virginia.
The areas under Russian control include Crimea, more than 99 percent of the Luhansk region, over 70 percent of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, all in the east or southeast, and fragments of the Kharkiv and Sumy regions in the northeast.
Putin told Trump on Wednesday that he would have to respond to Ukrainian drone attacks on Russia's bomber fleet and the bombings of the railways.
Zelenskyy warned Ukrainians in his video message to be particularly attentive to air raid warnings in the coming days.
The US believes that Putin's threatened retaliation against Ukraine over its attacks has not happened yet in earnest and is likely to be a significant, multipronged strike, US officials told Reuters. (Reuters)
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Korea Herald
9 hours ago
- Korea Herald
N. Korean leader Kim sends message congratulating Putin on Russia Day
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent a message congratulating Russian President Vladimir Putin on Russia Day, the North's state media reported Wednesday. North Korean Ambassador to Russia Sin Hong-chol "respectfully" conveyed Kim's message to the relevant official at the Russian foreign ministry, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said. Russia Day, which falls in June 12, is a national holiday that marks the 1990 adoption by the Russian parliament of the declaration of state sovereignty of the present-day Russian Federation. Details of Kim's letter were not disclosed, but the message likely reaffirmed the North's commitment to advancing their bilateral relations based on the treaty signed by the two leaders in June last year. In his previous message to Putin on Russia Day last year, Kim called their bilateral ties "a strategic asset" for both countries, reaffirming the North's steadfast commitment to advancing the relationship "in line with the demands of the new era." (Yonhap)
Korea Herald
19 hours ago
- Korea Herald
Commentary
Trump's diplomacy of the absurd Last month, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa became the first African leader to visit the White House during US President Donald Trump's second term. As he so infamously did with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February, Trump turned his televised meeting with Ramaphosa in the Oval Office into absurdist theater. Ramaphosa and his multiracial delegation were mere props in a larger performance aimed at Trump's nativist 'Make America Great Again' cult and right-wing xenophobes around the world. Trump, perpetuating racist stereotypes, accused marauding Black savages of hunting down innocent white farmers. It was a bizarre perversion of the historical record — namely, that a white minority had stripped Black South Africans of their land and labor rights for more than three centuries. Of course, Trump is fully ignorant of that history. The 1913 Natives Land Act, enacted by South Africa's white-minority government, reserved 93 percent of the country's land for white ownership. Today, white South Africans, comprising 7 percent of the population, still own 72 percent of all private farmland. Even though Ramaphosa's administration enacted a law in 2024 allowing for land expropriation without compensation, such land is to be used only for the public good, and any confiscations are subject to judicial review. Today, 13.2 million people, or roughly one-fifth of the population in what is the world's most unequal country, still live in extreme poverty, with the vast majority being Black. In 2024, 26,232 murders were recorded in South Africa, 44 of which occurred in farming communities; only eight of those 44 victims were farmers. According to data collected by the Transvaal Agricultural Union — an Afrikaner farmers' union — only 1,363 white farmers have been killed since 1990, amounting to less than 1 percent of total murders over that period. Only two of the 18 people murdered on farms between October 2024 and March 2025 were white. Equating apartheid-era atrocities with the current plight of white South Africans, who still own most of the country's wealth, is simply preposterous. Despite this, Trump has granted refugee status to white South African farmers, 59 of whom arrived in the US days before his meeting with Ramaphosa. Opening America's doors to this group, particularly as the Trump administration launches a crusade against illegal and legal immigrants, is less about protecting an endangered minority, and more about appealing to nativist sentiment among white Americans. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Trump ambushed Ramaphosa. After all, Trump has launched an assault on diversity programs in the US, is restoring the old names of military bases honoring Confederate generals and has taken extraordinary measures to erase America's long history of slavery. While the exchange between Ramaphosa and Trump started off friendly enough, it quickly degenerated into hectoring, with Trump repeatedly painting the perpetrators of oppression as its victims. After describing Ramaphosa as 'a little controversial,' the same president who once described Africa as full of 'shithole countries' proceeded to reinforce the trope of Black barbarism, noting: 'They say there's a lot of bad things going on in Africa.' At this point, Trump zeroed in on the egregious claim — amplified by the South African-born billionaire Elon Musk — that the Black-led African National Congress government was committing genocide against white people. Trump proceeded to screen a video of Julius Malema, a firebrand South African opposition leader who was expelled from the ANC in February 2012, chanting an apartheid-era song 'Kill the Boer,' referring to white farmers. Although South Africa's Supreme Court of Appeal ruled that the chant did not constitute incitement to violence, it is a divisive relic. The next video, which Musk had posted twice on X before the Oval Office meeting, depicted white crosses that Trump falsely claimed represented a burial site for more than 1,000 murdered white farmers. These were, however, temporary memorials, not gravesites, and were later removed. Trump also showed Ramaphosa an image, purportedly of massacred white South African farmers, that was later revealed to have been taken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Derrick Johnson, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, described Trump's remarks as 'extremely biased and racist.' They were also an attempt at a power play. One could hardly imagine Ramaphosa inviting Trump to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to accuse him of committing 'Black genocide' in America, before showing him a video of white policemen brutalizing and killing innocent Black motorists. In requesting the White House meeting, Ramaphosa had naively believed that he could reason with a Mafia don wielding a loaded pistol. The South African president maintained a dignified calm, but did not do enough to refute Trump's bogus claims. His delegation, which included three prominent white South Africans, the billionaire Johann Rupert and golfers Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, at Trump's behest, did not help matters. The presence of these wealthy white South Africans reassured Trump: he enthusiastically invited them to speak, even as he failed to make eye contact with his black counterpart. Els betrayed his inadequate understanding of history when he thanked the US for having supported the murderous apartheid army's invasion of Angola in the 1980s. Goosen talked of his crime-afflicted relatives having to erect electric fences. Rupert lobbied for Musk's Starlink satellite company to equip South Africa's police stations. These responses fed into the 'white savior' complex, imploring American knights in shining armor to save South Africans from savage Black criminals. Even Zingiswa Losi, the Black trade unionist who tried to set the record straight on land expropriation, spoke of Black women being raped and murdered. All this reinforced the message that South Africa is a crime scene — far from a powerful sales pitch for a country keen to attract foreign investors and tourists. This visit was supposed to 'reset' South Africa-US relations and start trade discussions, with Ramaphosa touting his country's critical mineral deposits. But despite efforts by South African officials and some media to spin the encounter as a success, it exposed deep and damaging divisions between the two countries. The only consolation is that Ramaphosa at least made it to the official lunch. Zelenskyy was not so lucky. - - - Adekeye Adebajo, a professor and a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria's Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, served on UN missions in South Africa, Western Sahara and Iraq. The views expressed here are the writer's own. — Ed.
Korea Herald
3 days ago
- Korea Herald
Russia advances to east-central Ukrainian region
Russia said Sunday that its forces had advanced to the edge of the east-central Ukrainian region of Dnipropetrovsk amid a public row between Moscow and Kyiv over peace negotiations and the return of thousands of bodies of soldiers who fell in the war. Despite talk of peace, the war is stepping up with Russian forces grabbing more territory in Ukraine and Kyiv unfurling high-profile drone and sabotage attacks on Russia's nuclear-capable bomber fleet and, according to Moscow, on railways. Russia, which controls a little under one-fifth of Ukrainian territory, has taken more than 190 square kilometers of the Sumy region of northeastern Ukraine in less than a month, according to pro-Ukrainian open-source maps. Now, according to the Russian defence ministry, units of the 90th Tank Division of the Central Grouping of Russian forces have reached the western frontier of Ukraine's Donetsk region and are attacking the adjacent Dnipropetrovsk region. "The enemy does not abandon its intentions to enter the Dnipropetrovsk region," Ukraine's Southern Defense Forces said on Telegram. "Our soldiers are courageously and professionally holding their section of the front, disrupting the occupier's plans. This work does not stop for a minute." Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chair of Russia's Security Council, said the Dnipropetrovsk offensive showed that if Ukraine did not want to accept the reality of Russia's territorial gains in peace talks, then Moscow's forces would advance further. The pro-Ukrainian Deep State map showed Russian forces very close to the Dnipropetrovsk region, which had a population of more than 3 million before the war, and advancing on the city of Kostyantynivka in the Donetsk region from several directions. A Ukrainian military spokesperson, Dmytro Zaporozhets, said that Russian forces were trying to "build a bridgehead for an attack" on Kostyantynivka, an important logistical hub for the Ukrainian army. Russia on Saturday accused Ukraine of delaying the swap of prisoners of war and the return of the bodies of 12,000 dead soldiers. Ukraine denied those claims. On Sunday, Russia said it was moving bodies towards the border and television showed refrigerated trucks containing the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers on the road in the Bryansk region. Ukraine, officials said, was playing politics with the dead. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pledged to press on with prisoner exchanges. "The Russian side is therefore, like always, even in these matters, is trying to play some kind of dirty political and information game," he said in his nightly video address. "We believe that the exchanges will continue and will do everything for this. If the Russians do not stand by agreements even in humanitarian matters, it casts great doubt on all international efforts — including those by the United States in terms of talks and diplomacy." Zelenskyy said he had reviewed commanders' reports about areas hit by heavy fighting, including near Pokrovsk, targeted by Moscow for months. He said the situation was "far from easy, but everything depends on the resilience of our units." US President Donald Trump, who says he wants an end to the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II, on Thursday likened it to a fight between young children and indicated that he might have to simply let the conflict play out. Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that he did not think Ukraine's leaders wanted peace, after accusing them of ordering a bombing in Bryansk, western Russia, that killed seven people and injured 115 a day before talks in Turkey. Ukraine, which has not commented on the attack on a Bryansk bridge, has similarly accused Moscow of not seriously seeking peace, citing Russian resistance to an immediate ceasefire. Russia is demanding international recognition of Crimea, a peninsula it annexed from Ukraine in 2014, and four other regions of Ukraine that Moscow has claimed as its own territory. Ukraine would have to withdraw its forces from all of them. Russia controlled 113,273 square kilometers, or 18.8 percent, of Ukrainian territory as of June 7, according to the Deep State map. That is an area bigger than the U.S. state of Virginia. The areas under Russian control include Crimea, more than 99 percent of the Luhansk region, over 70 percent of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, all in the east or southeast, and fragments of the Kharkiv and Sumy regions in the northeast. Putin told Trump on Wednesday that he would have to respond to Ukrainian drone attacks on Russia's bomber fleet and the bombings of the railways. Zelenskyy warned Ukrainians in his video message to be particularly attentive to air raid warnings in the coming days. The US believes that Putin's threatened retaliation against Ukraine over its attacks has not happened yet in earnest and is likely to be a significant, multipronged strike, US officials told Reuters. (Reuters)
