Liveblog: ++ Dead and injured in rescue operation in Cherson ++

A lifeboat was shot at while evacuating civilians from the flooded area near Cherson. There were at least three dead. Ukraine and Russia exchanged prisoners again. All developments in the live blog.

According to the authorities, at least three people were killed in an attack during the evacuation of civilians in the southern Ukrainian flood area. Another ten people were injured when a lifeboat was shelled, said the Ukrainian regional governor of Kherson, Oleksandr Prokudin, in the online service Telegram.

According to the authorities, the number of fatalities in the Ukrainian-controlled area flooded after the Kakhovka dam ruptured had risen to at least six, and 35 other people were missing. According to the local authorities, at least eight people died in the Russian-occupied area on the banks of the Dnipro River, and 13 more are missing.

French President Emmanuel Macron receives Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Polish Head of State Andrzej Duda for a three-way summit in Paris on Monday evening. A joint dinner is planned, which will deal with the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, further support for Kiev and preparations for the NATO summit in July.

The tripartite meetings between Germany, France and Poland are called the “Weimar Triangle”. The discussion format was founded in August 1991 by the then Foreign Ministers Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Roland Dumas and Krzysztof Skubiszewski in Weimar, Thuringia. Initially, it served primarily to bring Poland and other Eastern European states closer to the European Union and NATO.

Ukraine and Russia have each released more than 90 fighters in a new prisoner swap. The head of the Ukrainian presidential office, Andriy Yermak, announced in his blog on the Telegram news channel that 95 men had been returned to Kyiv. “Many of our people were injured in captivity,” he said.

The Russian Defense Ministry in Moscow reported the release of 94 of its own fighters from Ukrainian captivity. The released Russian soldiers are to be treated in the ministry’s medical facilities and undergo rehabilitation, the agency said in a statement. Russia and Ukraine have already exchanged prisoners several times in the 15-month war. Most recently, there was a major exchange at the end of May.

According to military information from Kiev, Ukrainian soldiers have liberated the town of Blahodatne in the Donetsk region, which is largely occupied by Russia. The troops released a video showing the raising of the Ukrainian flag on top of a half-ruined building. Prisoners were also taken, it said.

There was initially no comment from the Russian official side. The Russian army has been claiming for days that it is repelling the Ukrainian offensive. However, Russian military bloggers close to the Kremlin also reported that Blahodatne had been abandoned because Moscow’s fighters feared encirclement there. Accordingly, the village of Neskutschne was also taken. The village of Lobkove in the Zaporizhia region is said to have been liberated from Russian occupation.

The head of the Russian mercenary group Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has stated that his fighters would not sign a contract with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. The Defense Ministry on Saturday instructed all volunteer commands to sign contracts with the ministry by the end of June.

“Wagner will not sign any contracts with Shoigu,” says Prigozhin. The Wagner group is integrated into the overall system and completely subordinate to Russia’s interests, but its highly efficient command structure would be damaged by being subordinate to Shoigu. Prigozhin has repeatedly clashed with the regular military and has repeatedly criticized the conduct of the war in Ukraine.

According to the Russian Defense Ministry, Ukraine has unsuccessfully attempted to attack a ship in the Russian Black Sea Fleet that is supposed to protect natural gas pipelines. The ship is monitoring the situation along the Turkstream and Blue Stream pipelines in the Black Sea, the ministry said.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu awards medals to soldiers who, according to Russian sources, destroyed four German “Leopard” tanks and five US-made “Bradley” combat vehicles while repelling a Ukrainian counterattack. Shoigu is shown on state television presenting soldiers who say they have destroyed enemy tanks and armored vehicles with the “Hero of Russia” gold star – Russia’s highest military award.

According to the Russian leadership, it currently sees no basis for a possible dialogue with Ukraine. At the moment there are practically no preconditions for an agreement, Presidential Office spokesman Dmitry Peskov told state television channel Rossiya. In addition, there is no “even a wafer-thin basis for any kind of dialogue”.

The Ukrainian government has reiterated its allegations that Russia deliberately destroyed the Kakhovka Dam in order to prevent Ukrainian forces from advancing in the south of the country. The demolition of the dam from inside the associated hydroelectric power station was apparently carried out with the intention of preventing the Ukrainian defense forces from launching an offensive in the Kherson region, says Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maljar. In addition, Russia wanted to enable the deployment of reserves to the Zaporizhia and Bakhmut areas.

After the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in the Kherson region, the search for missing persons continues. The Interior Ministry of Ukraine announced that 32 settlements with 3784 houses were flooded on the right side of the Dnipro bank controlled by Kiev. The authorities had announced the previous evening that 29 people were missing. 1,400 emergency services were involved in eliminating the consequences of the flood after the dam broke, it said.

The evacuation of villages also continued on the Russian-occupied side of the bank. Thousands of people were evacuated to safety on both sides of the river in the contested area.

According to British findings, the destruction of the Kachowka dam is likely to have an impact on the drinking water supply of the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula. The dam breach has almost certainly caused severe disruption to Crimea’s main source of fresh water, the North Crimean Canal, the British Ministry of Defense said. The water from the Kakhovka reservoir will soon stop flowing across the canal towards Crimea. This will reduce the availability of fresh water in southern Kherson Oblast and northern Crimea, the British wrote in their daily intelligence update.

However, Russia will probably meet the immediate water needs of the population with the help of reservoirs, water rationing and the supply of Russian bottled water, among other things. Communities on both the Ukrainian-controlled and Russian-held sides of the Dnipro River are simultaneously facing a sanitation crisis with limited access to safe drinking water and an increased risk of disease.

According to Western experts, the Ukrainian armed forces have achieved local successes in their offensive against the Russian army in the Zaporizhia region in the south of the country. The US Institute for War Studies (ISW) in Washington announced that the gains are in the west of the Zaporizhia region and there in the southwest and southeast of the city of Orikhiv. Overall, there are Ukrainian offensive actions on four sections of the front, it said.

On the other hand, the Russian military announced that it had successfully repelled the attacks there and in the Donetsk region around the city of Bakhmut. The Ukrainian Air Force also informed about the repeated shooting down of six drones in the Kharkiv and Sumy regions on the border with Russia.

In the Belgorod region bordering Ukraine, which has been under fire for days, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov announced that a freight train with 15 empty wagons had derailed. There were no injuries, and regional train services had to be temporarily suspended. The background was initially unclear. In Russia, rail partisans repeatedly commit acts of sabotage against railway facilities in order to stop military supplies.

A drone fell early in the morning near the village of Strelkovka in the Kaluga region of Russia. “According to preliminary information, there are no injuries,” said the governor of the region, Vladislav Shapsha, via Telegram. The Kaluga region borders on the Moscow metropolitan area in the north.

After her third triumph at the French Open, the Pole Iga Swiatek called on other players to unite against the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine. “I support all Ukrainians because I know that their situation is not easy. If I were in their shoes, I honestly don’t know if I could compete,” said the 22-year-old after winning the final in Paris. The tennis community should “do everything together to stop Russian aggression”.

According to the military, the Ukrainian army has advanced up to 1.4 kilometers in some places near Bakhmut. The General Staff declared that Russian attacks at Bakhmut and Marjinka had been repelled. Russia has suffered heavy losses, which the country is trying to hide. The information cannot be independently verified.