Ukraine

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia’s defense minister said Russian forces took control Sunday of the last major Ukrainian-held city in Ukraine’s Luhansk province, bringing Moscow closer to its stated goal of seizing all of Ukraine’s Donbas region.

Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu told President Vladimir Putin that Russia’s troops together with members of a local separatist militia “have established full control over the city of Lysychansk,” Russian news agencies reported.

SLOVYANSK, Ukraine (AP) — A group of young off-duty Ukrainian soldiers gathered at a military distribution center to enjoy a rare respite from the fighting that has again engulfed their fractured home in eastern Ukraine.

As they shared jokes and a pizza, artillery explosions could be heard a few kilometers away — a reminder of the looming battle that threatens to unfold here in the city of Slovyansk, which was occupied by Russian proxy fighters in 2014.

KHERSON, July 2. /TASS/: Russian security services thwarted a terrorist attack in the city of Kherson, the regional Interior Ministry said in a statement on Saturday.

"Officers from Russian security services thwarted a major terrorist attack in Kherson yesterday, detecting a condenser exploder," the statement reads.

KYIV, Ukarine (AP) — Russian forces are pounding the city of Lysychansk and its surroundings in an all-out attempt to seize the last stronghold of resistance in eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk province, the governor said Saturday.

Ukrainian fighters have spent weeks trying to defend the city and to keep it from falling to Russia, as neighboring Sievierodonetsk did a week ago. The Russian Defense Ministry said its forces took control of an oil refinery on Lysychansk’s edge in recent days, but Luhansk Gov. Serhiy Haidai reported Friday that fighting for the facility continued.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The latest in a litany of horrors in Ukraine came this week as Russian firepower rained down on civilians in a busy shopping mall far from the front lines of a war in its fifth month.

The timing was not likely a coincidence.

While much of the attritional war in Ukraine’s east is hidden from sight, the brutality of Russian missile strikes on a mall in the central city of Kremenchuk and on residential buildings in the capital, Kyiv, unfolded in full view of the world and especially of Western leaders gathered for a trio of summits in Europe.

POKROVSK, Ukraine (AP) — Russian missile attacks on residential areas killed at least 19 people in a Ukrainian town near Odesa early Friday, authorities reported. The airstrikes pierced the cautious relief expressed a day earlier after Russian forces withdrew from a Black Sea island from where they could have staged an assault on the city with Ukraine’s biggest port.

KYIV, June 30 (Reuters) - Russia on Thursday withdrew from Snake Island, a craggy speck of land in the Black Sea, handing Ukraine a symbolically-potent political victory and depriving Moscow of a strategic outpost for its air defences and electronic warfare systems.

The island's capture by Russian forces on the first day of their invasion entered Ukrainian folklore as a tale of bold resistance after Kyiv said that one of its border guards had told a Russian warship demanding their surrender to "fuck off".

YAHIDNE, Ukraine (AP) — On the outskirts of a Ukrainian village stand the remnants of a small school that was partially destroyed in the early weeks of the Russian invasion.

Surrounded by tall pine trees, the school’s broken windows offer glimpses of abandoned classrooms that are unlikely to see students again anytime soon. It is just one of many buildings in Yahidne that were shattered by the war.

KREMENCHUK, Ukraine (AP) — French President Emmanuel Macron said Tuesday that Russia “cannot and should not win” the war in Ukraine, a day after a Russian missile attack on a crowded shopping mall that killed 18 put the conflict’s terrible toll on full view.

KYIV, June 27 (Reuters) - Ukraine's richest man filed a lawsuit against Russia at Europe’s top human rights court on Monday, seeking compensation over what he has said are billions of dollars in business losses since Russia's invasion.

Rinat Akhmetov, owner of the Azovstal steelworks in the city of Mariupol where Ukrainian fighters defied weeks of Russian bombardment, sued Russia for "grievous violations of his property rights" at the European Court of Human Rights, his System Capital Management (SCM) holding company said.