Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,273
Fighting
Russian authorities have returned the remains of 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers, Ukraine's Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War said on Monday, according to The Kyiv Independent news outlet.
Russia's state-run TASS news agency confirmed that Russia returned the bodies of 1,000 soldiers, adding that Ukraine returned the bodies of 19 Russian soldiers.
Separately, TASS reported that about 1,370 Ukrainian soldiers were killed in a single day, citing the Russian Ministry of Defence. Al Jazeera could not verify this claim independently.
Russian forces dropped 250kg (550 lbs) bombs on the city of Kostiantynivka in Ukraine's Donetsk region, Serhii Horbunov, the head of the Kostiantynivka City Military Administration, wrote on Facebook on Monday. At least two people were injured, and apartments and an education building were damaged, Horbunov said.
A Russian drone attack on an ambulance injured two emergency workers in the Kupiansk district of Ukraine's Kharkiv region, regional police said in a post on Telegram.
TASS reports that a Ukrainian drone attack caused a power outage in Ukraine's Zaporizhia region, according to the governor of Russian-occupied Zaporizhia, Yevgeny Balitsky.
The attack did not affect the operation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, TASS later reported.
Local officials in the front-line city of Kamianka-Dniprovska in Russian-occupied Zaporizhia reported 'massive' shelling from Ukrainian forces, causing at least six explosions and damaging a hospital, according to a TASS report that did not mention casualties.
The brother of Vitaly Milonov, a representative in Russia's State Duma, the lower house in parliament, died after being injured 'as a result of military action' in Ukraine's Luhansk region, TASS said. The lawmaker's brother was serving as a volunteer in Russian army intelligence when he was injured, TASS reports.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko wrote in a post on the Telegram messaging app that 52,000 people have been evacuated from Ukraine's Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions in recent months due to fighting.
Peace talks
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy 'are in the process of setting it up', Trump said in relation to a proposed bilateral meeting between the two leaders. Trump made the comment in a radio show a day after he met with Zelenskyy and several European leaders at the White House.
Switzerland would be ready to host Putin for peace talks, despite an existing arrest warrant for his arrest from the International Criminal Court, the country's foreign minister, Ignazio Cassis, said.
Trump provided details to Fox News on the nature of potential US involvement in security guarantees for Ukraine, saying that US support would probably be 'by air', whereas European countries 'are willing to put people on the ground'.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed US air support was 'an option and a possibility', but, like Trump, did not provide details.
'The president has definitively stated US boots will not be on the ground in Ukraine, but we can certainly help in the coordination and perhaps provide other means of security guarantees to our European allies,' Leavitt told a news briefing.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte discussed security guarantees for Ukraine in a phone call on Tuesday, the Turkish presidency said in a statement.
European Council President Antonio Costa said that the process to make Ukraine a member of the European Union needs to advance, and Europe has to be part of future peace negotiations alongside Ukraine, Russia and the United States.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC that India was profiteering on its purchases of Russian oil. 'This… Indian arbitrage – buying cheap Russian oil, reselling it as product has just sprung during the war – which is unacceptable,' Bessent said.
Putin discussed his recent meeting with Trump in Alaska on a call with Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the Kremlin said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Al Jazeera
5 minutes ago
- Al Jazeera
Is Ukraine closer to peace after Trump's meetings with Zelenskyy, Putin?
Kyiv, Ukraine – With unprecedented backing from European leaders, Ukraine seems – in theory – to have secured 'very good protection' from the United States. 'We will give them very good protection, very good security,' US President Donald Trump said on Monday, sitting next to his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy and seven helmsmen from Europe. The meeting followed the Trump-hosted summit in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which yielded no ceasefire. Many questions loom about how the collective Western aegis will help Kyiv navigate a peace deal with Moscow and shield it from the resumption of hostilities. A Ukrainian military analyst is sceptical about the real outcome of Monday's gathering. 'No decision has been made from the viewpoint of security guarantees, the supply of arms and [the deployment of Western] troops,' Lt Gen Ihor Romanenko, former deputy head of Ukraine's general staff of armed forces, told Al Jazeera. No 'direct conflict' with Russia The security guarantees are vague, undefined and will most likely be 'relative', according to Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Kyiv-based Penta think tank. A mutual assistance deal with Washington and Brussels guaranteeing their rapid military intervention if Russia attacks Ukraine 'is hardly possible', he told Al Jazeera. 'Because we're talking about Russia with nuclear weapons, and Americans along with Europeans will avoid the risk of a direct military conflict with Russia,' he said. What may secure the guarantees is a Trump-backed deal that removes the fiscal burden of protecting Ukraine from US taxpayers, provides US arms manufacturers with hefty profits and makes Europe foot the bill. Zelenskyy said he agreed to the future supply of US-made weapons worth $100bn that Europe will pay for and will take years to manufacture and deliver. The new mechanism has been dubbed PURL – the Prioritised Ukraine's Requirements List – and Berlin has already agreed to contribute $500bn for military equipment and munitions. 'Unacceptable deployment' A 'symbolic guarantee' could be the deployment of a European peacekeeping contingent to Ukraine that could become a containment factor, Fesenko said. 'But Russia is categorically against it, and that would be a problem at further talks,' he added. Moscow bristled at the prospect, calling it the 'reanimation of an obviously unviable idea' that is 'categorically unacceptable' in any format, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Tuesday. Another possible guarantee could be Kyiv's strategic partnership deal with Washington, modelled after similar accords with Egypt or South Korea, Fesenko said. Unlike the February debacle at the White House, when Trump and his Vice President JD Vance insulted Zelenskyy for being 'ungrateful' and briefly halted US military aid, this time Trump seems to have warmed up to the Ukrainian leader. 'The White House didn't want a scandal, it wanted an accord, constructive decisions,' Fesenko said. Zelenskyy also changed his ways around Trump; instead of his trademark military fatigues, on Monday he wore official attire – a black suit – and showered the host with 'thank yous'. He also held his ground – literally and metaphorically – by not agreeing to cede the eastern Donbas region that Putin demands as a precondition for freezing the front line in other regions. Zelenskyy 'managed to find an ideal balance between the principled defence of his main points, including the matter of ceding territories to Russia', Fesenko said. Controlling the exports Some analysts suggest that while providing Ukraine with funds, arms and diplomatic support, the European Union failed to curb crucial military exports to Russia. 'It didn't do the only thing that seriously threatened Russia's military machine from Europe, namely, it didn't take any real steps to limit the export of equipment, materials and tools for military industries to Russia,' Nikolay Mitrokhin of Germany's Bremen University told Al Jazeera. The war revealed Russia's technological disadvantage: A lack of machine tools and electronics for its advanced weaponry, observers have said. Moscow has ramped up the purchase of such tools and chips, mostly through former Soviet republics such as Kyrgyzstan. The EU could have easily facilitated a system of checking the final destination of these exports and imposing colossal fines on the manufacturers and exporters who allowed them to reach Russia, Mitrokhin said. 'Russia could have hardly found an adequate replacement in China or other nations, especially during the war's first stage,' he said. Focusing on China Trump's seemingly abrupt about-face regarding a peace settlement in Ukraine could actually be rooted in Washington's bigger geopolitical strategy. The Russian-Ukrainian war has cost the White House hundreds of billions of dollars and rocked its relationship with the Kremlin. But Washington's main geopolitical rival is Beijing, not Moscow, and Trump is reluctant to spend hundreds of billions more to deter Russia, analysts said. 'That's the money that can be invested in the re-industrialisation of the United States that is of paramount importance in the context of countering China,' Kyiv-based analyst Aleksey Kushch told Al Jazeera. The White House does not want to bet its entire geopolitical potential on a nuclear escalation with Russia the way it did during the Cold War. China reaped enormous geopolitical gains from the Cold War escalation after US former President Richard Nixon's groundbreaking 1972 visit to Beijing and Washington's subsequent push to invest in China's industrialisation. 'China always wins in case of a confrontation between the US and Russia,' Kushch said. Therefore, Trump needs the Russian-Ukrainian war to be over so that Washington can focus on containing China, he added. Putin's 'hoodlum mindset' The peace settlement and security guarantees are complicated by the fundamental difference between the way the West and Russia see the war, a Ukrainian war veteran said. While Western politicians see any conflict as beneficial or detrimental to their nations' interests, Putin has the mindset of a hoodlum who always wants to look tough, said Yuri Bohdanchenko, who lost his right leg after stepping on a Russian landmine in the southern region of Kherson in 2023. 'Putin thought that conquering us would be easy, but when he faced so much resistance, he didn't stop because he didn't want the world to consider him weak,' he told Al Jazeera. Putin snubs the skyrocketing death toll and Russia's deepening economic degradation – and understands that the war's end threatens his grip on power, Bohdanchenko said. 'Fighting is cheap, considering the [high] oil prices and the propaganda effect at home, when he can use the war as an excuse to purge anyone who dares say a word against him, his people and the corruption they breed,' he said.
Al Jazeera
4 hours ago
- Al Jazeera
What is Israel's ‘most moral army in the world' doing in Gaza?
The Israeli military, which styles itself as the 'most moral army in the world', may be routinely committing war crimes, according to analysts in Israel and doctors who have worked in Gaza. While killings, beatings and the arbitrary arrest of Palestinians are not new to the Israeli army, a long process of dehumanisation, the infiltration of far-right ideologies in the army and a lack of accountability have led to a scenario where Israeli soldiers can do as they please without even needing an operational reason, analysts said. 'As far as I can see, this is a new phenomenon,' Erella Grassiani of the University of Amsterdam, who has written on what she referred to as the moral 'numbing' of Israeli soldiers during the second Intifada of 2000. 'It's not as if Israeli soldiers haven't beaten and arrested children for throwing stones before, but this is new,' she said. 'Previously, there were some kind of rules of engagement, even if they were loosely followed, but they were there. What we're seeing now is completely different,' she said. War as sport Accusations of casual brutality by Israeli soldiers in Gaza, and the occupied West Bank, are longstanding. Israeli soldiers have posted social media videos of themselves wearing the dresses of women whose homes they have raided, or playing with their underwear. And there are accounts of soldiers shooting civilians for 'target practice' or simply to stave off boredom. In early August, the BBC investigated the cases of Israeli soldiers killing children in Gaza. Of the 160 cases examined, 95 children had been shot in the head or the chest – shots that could not be claimed as 'intended to wound only'. In addition to killing children, there are accounts suggesting that Israeli soldiers have been using the civilians who gather around aid distribution sites run by the self-styled GHF for target practice. 'The GHF sites are set up as death traps,' British surgeon Nick Maynard, who returned in July from his third trip to Gaza since the war began, told Al Jazeera. 'They're compounds containing enough food for a family to eat for a few days, but not for all of the thousands of people they keep waiting outside. They then open the gates and let the chaos, fighting and even rioting happen, which they then use as a justification to fire into the crowd,' he said. The nature of the shooting became clear to the doctors and emergency room medics at nearby Nasser Hospital, where Maynard was working. 'I was operating on a 12-year-old boy, who later died,' Maynard said. 'He'd been shot at one of the GHF sites. I had a conversation about it with a colleague in the Emergency Room later, who told me that he and other medics had seen repeated and strong patterns of wound grouping,' he explained. Wound grouping refers to the phenomenon where several patients present with an injury to the same part of their body. The following day, many patients come in with a wound on a different part of the body, suggesting to Maynard that Israeli snipers were either playing or using civilians to improve their aim, as he told Sky News previously. An investigation by the Israeli magazine +972 in July 2024 painted a bleak picture of Israeli soldiers with no restrictions on their ability to shoot at civilians in Gaza. 'There was total freedom,' a soldier who served in Gaza for months told +972. 'If there is [even] a feeling of threat, there is no need to explain – you just shoot … it is permissible to shoot at their centre of mass [their body], not into the air', the anonymous soldier continued. 'It's permissible to shoot everyone, a young girl, an old woman.' Of the 52 probes that the Israeli army said it carried out into crimes it has been accused of committing in Gaza or the West Bank between October 2023 and June 2025, 88 percent were stalled or were closed with no action taken, according to a study by Action on Armed Violence (AOAV). Only one had resulted in a prison sentence against the accused. According to AOAV, the 52 cases they examined involved the killing of 1,303 people, the wounding of 1,880 people and the reported torture of two more. Even when there was footage of an incident, such as what appeared to be the gang rape of a Palestinian prisoner at the Sde Teiman Israeli prison facility, public pressure, including from members of the Israeli cabinet, led to the accused's eventual release. Accusations that the Israeli army routinely tortures Palestinians date back to at least 1967, when the Red Crescent documented the systematic torture of prisoners in Nablus Prison in the West Bank. There has also been an increase in the dehumanising language used to refer to Palestinians that researchers now say is commonplace within the army. As far back as 1967, Israeli figures such as David Hacohen, one-time Israeli ambassador to Burma, now Myanmar,, were recorded denying that Palestinians were even human. In 1985, a survey of 520 books in Hebrew children's literature found that 86 depicted Palestinians as 'inhuman, war lovers, devious monsters, bloodthirsty dogs, preying wolves, or vipers'. Twenty years later, when many of those now deployed to Gaza were likely at school, 10 percent of a sample batch of Israeli children who were asked to draw Palestinians depicted them as animals. 'The dehumanisation of Palestinians is a process that goes back decades,' Grassiani of the University of Amsterdam said. 'But I'd say it's now complete. 'We've seen incredibly cruel acts from the first day to now, with Israeli soldiers seeking revenge for [the Hamas-led attack of] October 7,' she said. 'It's like a snowball running down a hill to which there's no bottom,' Haim Bresheeth, author of An Army Like No Other, a book about the Israeli military. 'Every year, the violence is ratcheted up,' he said. 'The idea of using civilians as target practice is the logical outcome. 'It's a new sport, a blood sport, and these sports always develop from the bottom up,' he said of Israel's infantry. 'It's twisted, murderous, and it's sick.'
Al Jazeera
5 hours ago
- Al Jazeera
Security guarantees for Ukraine are 'not going to be sufficient'
Samuel Ramani talks about potential outcomes for Ukraine Quotable Samuel Ramani, an associate fellow at Royal United Services Institute talks about potential outcomes for Ukraine following the meeting between Trump, Zelenskyy and EU leaders. Video Duration 01 minutes 10 seconds 01:10 Video Duration 01 minutes 07 seconds 01:07 Video Duration 01 minutes 19 seconds 01:19 Video Duration 01 minutes 30 seconds 01:30 Video Duration 01 minutes 24 seconds 01:24 Video Duration 01 minutes 19 seconds 01:19 Video Duration 01 minutes 33 seconds 01:33
