Updated August 13, 2023 at 4:36 p.m. EDT|Published August 13, 2023 at 2:44 a.m. EDT
A Russian military ship sails near the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea last month. (AP)Russian shelling killed seven people in Ukraine’s Kherson region Sunday, including four members of the same family, one of whom was a 3-week-old infant, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said. The baby girl’s 12-year-old brother and their parents were also killed. The boy was initially recovered alive but later died at the hospital.
The deaths in Kherson, in southern Ukraine, came amid another slew of strikes across the country. Since Saturday, Russian forces have launched seven missiles, 47 airstrikes and 43 rocket attacks, some of which killed civilians and destroyed infrastructure, Ukraine’s military said early Sunday.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said that it foiled a drone attack on the Crimean Peninsula over the weekend, and shot down at least two missiles fired at the Crimean Bridge, which links Russia with the territory. Moscow illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.
Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
Key developments
Ukraine’s Interior Ministry released photos of what appear to be blurred-out bodies near the charred remains of a one-story home in the village of Shiroka Balka in Kherson, where the family and one other resident were killed Sunday. Two men died in strikes on the neighboring village of Stanislav, according to Klymenko. Russian forces withdrew from Kherson city late last year amid a Ukrainian counteroffensive, but they still control territory on the left bank of the Dnieper River.
A Russian warship fired warning shots at a Ukraine-bound cargo vessel in the Black Sea on Sunday, Russia’s state-run Tass news agency reported. It was the first such incident since Russia withdrew last month from a U.N.-backed deal allowing for the safe wartime export of Ukrainian grain. Tass quoted Russia’s Defense Ministry as saying it fired warning shots after the vessel did not heed orders to stop. Russian forces then boarded and inspected the ship before allowing it to continue on to the Ukrainian port city of Izmail.
The incident came a day after Ukraine began registering vessels to pass through temporary corridors in the Black Sea. Ukraine’s navy announced the creation of the corridors last week and said they would be used mostly to allow civilian vessels stuck since the start of the war to exit Ukrainian ports, Interfax Ukraine reported on Saturday, citing Ukrainian Navy spokesman Dmytro Pletenchuk.
Britain’s Defense Ministry said Sunday that “there is a realistic possibility that the Kremlin no longer funds” the Wagner mercenary group, which “is likely moving towards a down-sizing and reconfiguration process.” Wagner relocated to Belarus last month after a failed mutiny by its founder, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, once an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Battleground updates
Ukraine has made “tactically significant advances” along the border between the Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk regions, according to Ukrainian officials and an analysis Saturday by the Institute for the Study of War. The advances, while small, could dispel fears that the Ukrainian counteroffensive may be faltering at a time of growing weariness among Ukrainians.
More than 100 people were evacuated Sunday from the Kupiansk district in the Kharkiv region of northeast Ukraine, a local official said. Oleg Sinegubov, the head of Kharkiv’s regional administration, last week ordered a mandatory evacuation of Kupiansk’s civilian population, which he said numbered 11,000, because of increased Russian shelling. He said Ukrainian authorities have evacuated about 200 people since the announcement Thursday.
A first responder with Ukraine’s State Emergency Service died in the hospital on Sunday after being wounded in a pair of missile strikes that hit Pokrovsk in the eastern Donetsk region on Aug. 7. The death of Coronel Vitalii Kints, who headed the 9th state fire and rescue squad, brings the death toll of the twin strikes to 10. More than 80 people were injured.
From our correspondents
Russia’s new history textbooks teach Putin’s alternate reality: Russian high-schoolers are set to head back to class next month, and when they do, some of their textbooks will have a timely, if untrue, update.
Among the sections in the new history textbook — formally introduced by Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov last week and aimed at graduating 17-year-olds — will be “confrontation with the West” and “Ukraine is a neo-Nazi state.” It also includes a falsehood that Putin has asserted throughout his invasion of Ukraine: “Russia did not start any military actions but is trying to end them.”
The new manuscript is part of an extraordinary gaslighting campaign in which Putin has tried to convince his people that the West is to blame for the war in Ukraine — which he refers to as a “special military operation” — and that Russia is a victim rather than the aggressor. » …
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