Here is the status for Sunday, June 16, 2024.
Near eastern Ukraine, hopes for diplomatic progress are almost nil. “I hope it will bring some changes in the future. But, as experience shows, nothing has come,” Maksym, a tank commander in the Donetsk region, told the AFP news agency.
Outside a peace summit in Switzerland, the wife of a Ukrainian soldier captured by Russia said she hoped leaders would agree to “some exchange process for prisoners of war”. “I want to see my husband,” Hanna, who fled her home in the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol and now lives in Sweden, told AFP.
Meanwhile, a Russian journalist was killed in a drone strike in eastern Ukraine, his news organization News.RU reported on Telegram, two days after another reporter died near the front lines. Nikita Chitsaki was killed in the attack near the Saint-Nicolas monastery in the town of Vugledar, the agency said. Russian President Vladimir Putin said earlier this month that “at least 30” Russian journalists had been killed since the start of the conflict, but could not independently verify that number.
Elsewhere, deserters from the Russian military live in fear of reprisals from Moscow after abandoning their posts in the ongoing war with Ukraine. Many feel abandoned by the West because they don’t have the passports they need and only have documents that allow them to reach neighboring Kazakhstan or Armenia.
