Ukraine has recaptured several settlements in the north-eastern Kharkiv region as part of a surprise counterattack, president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has claimed. “This week we have good news from Kharkiv region,” he said in his Wednesday evening address, adding that “now is not the right time to name those settlements where the Ukrainian flag has returned”. An official representing the Russian-controlled Donetsk People’s Republic said on Tuesday that Ukrainian forces “encircled” Balakliia, an eastern town situated between Kharkiv and Russian-occupied Izium.
US intelligence says Ukrainian forces are making “slow but meaningful progress” on the battlefield. “We’ll see how things pan out,” defence undersecretary Colin Kahl said. “But I certainly think things are going better on the Ukrainian side right now in the south than is true on the Russian side.” The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a Washington-based thinktank, reported on Wednesday that Ukrainian forces probably captured Verbivka, less than two miles (3.2km) north-west of Balakliia, on Tuesday, citing geo-locatable images posted by Ukrainian soldiers.
Shelling resumed near Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant on Wednesday. Ukrainian officials accused Russian forces of firing on the city of Nikopol, across from the plant, as well as in Enerhodar, where the power plant is located. “Employees of communal and other services simply do not have time to complete emergency and restoration work, as another shelling reduces their work to zero,” the Ukrainian mayor of Enerhodar, Dmytro Orlov, said on Telegram.
The UN has accused Moscow of forcing Ukrainians into detention camps and even prisons via a Kremlin-directed “filtration” program, and removing children from the war zone to hand over to adoptive parents inside Russia. “We are concerned that the Russian authorities have adopted a simplified procedure to grant Russian citizenship to children without parental care, and that these children would be eligible for adoption by Russian families,” Ilze Brands Kehris, assistant UN secretary-general for human rights, told the security council. The US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, told the council that estimates indicate authorities have “interrogated, detained, and forcibly deported” between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainians to Russia since late February in an attempt “to prepare for an attempted annexation”.
The body of a British aid worker who was captured by Russian proxies in April has been handed to Ukraine with “possible signs of unspeakable torture”, according to the country’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba. Paul Urey, 45, from Warrington, Cheshire, was captured along with another Briton, Dylan Healey. The two men were charged with “mercenary activities” by the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, but in July the Russian proxy authorities announced that Urey had died as a result of “illness and stress”. Kuleba said Urey’s body had been returned, showing possible signs of torture.
Vladimir Putin has threatened to tear up a fragile Ukraine grain deal allowing exports from the Black Sea. During a bellicose speech at an economic conference in Vladivostok, Putin said he would speak with the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, about “limiting the destinations for grain exports”, claiming that only two of 87 ships leaving Ukraine with grain had gone to developing countries. Data from the UN showed the claim was false by a factor of at least 10.
Putin also threatened to cut off all deliveries of gas, oil, and coal to Europe if they imposed a price cap on Russian energy imports. “Will there be any political decisions that contradict the contracts? Yes, we just won’t fulfil them. We will not supply anything at all if it contradicts our interests,” he said, according to a Reuters translation of his remarks. “We will not supply gas, oil, coal, heating oil – we will not supply anything.” Recalling a Russian fairytale, he said that Europeans could “freeze like the wolf’s tail”.
Putin declared that Russia had “lost nothing” in launching a war on Ukraine during a belligerent and defiant speech at the Russian Eastern Economic Forum on Wednesday. “We haven’t lost anything and we won’t lose anything,” he said, when asked about the cost of the invasion. “The main gain is the strengthening of our sovereignty.”
