Victoria Amelina, killed by a Russian missile strike on a pizza restaurant in eastern Ukraine

Sunday’s Coverage: Zelenskiy — 100,000+ Wagner Group Casualties

Map: Institute for Study of War

UPDATE 1823 GMT:

The Zelenskiy Government has named the Anglo-Dutch consumer goods giant Unilever as an international sponsor of war.

The designation was prompted by a law in Russia obliging all large companies operating in the country to contribute directly to the invasion of Ukraine. Unilever, Procter & Gamble — the world’s largest manufacturer of household chemicals and personal care products — and the French supermarket group Leroy Merlin have been designated.

Campaigners are calling on Unilever’s new head, Hein Schumacher, to withdraw from Russia. The conglomerate’s local business Unilever Rus continues to sell products from tea to ice cream. It doubled profits to 9.2bn roubles ($102.8 million) and paid the Russian State 29.62bn roubles ($331 million) in taxes last year.

On Monday, the Ukraine Solidarity Project set up a giant billboard outside the Anglo-Dutch consumer group’s London headquarters. Wounded Ukrainian soldiers were portrayed in the style of advertisements for Dove beauty products with the slogan, “Helping to Fund Russia’s War in Ukraine.”

Unilever has said that it ceased all imports and exports of its products into and out of Russia in March 2022.

UPDATE 1816 GMT:

The toll from Russia’s four-drone attack on Sumy in northern Ukraine has risen to two killed and 19 wounded, including a 5-year-old child.

An official building and two residential buildings were damaged.

UPDATE 1333 GMT:

The Kremlin may be planning to postpone September’s staged “elections” in regions it has seized from Ukraine.

State media featured Ella Panfilova, who chairs Russia’s central election commission, telling Vladimir Putin, “Since the situation is really difficult, anything can happen.”

The Russians occupied Crimea in 2014. Last September, Putin proclaimed four other regions — Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in the south and Luhansk and Donetsk in the east — as part of Russia, either though Moscow only controlled part of the areas.

Within weeks, Ukraine had liberated more territory in the regions, and it is advancing again in the current counter-offensive.

Russian officials had declared that the regions would hold elections on September 10, along with counterparts in Russia.

Panfilova told Putin:

If unforeseen circumstances arise — in some areas the situation may deteriorate dramatically — and we see that there is a serious danger to the life and health of residents, then we have the right to postpone these elections.

We will certainly use this right if there are serious reasons for it.

Putin replied, “Understood.”

UPDATE 1236 GMT:

A former Ukrainian senior intelligence official has been charged with treason.

Oleh Kulinich, who headed the Crimea directorate of the SBU domestic intelligence service, was arrested last July. He was accused of carrying out orders from Moscow to recruit other Russian-friendly operatives.

If convicted, he could serve up to 15 years in prison.

“This is a clear signal to all those who work for the enemy: the SBU will definitely find you and make you answer for what you have done,” said SBU head Vasyl Malyuk.

UPDATE 1112 GMT:

A Russian drone attack on a residential building has killed a civilian in the Sumy region in northern Ukraine.

UPDATE 0909 GMT:

The queue on Krymsky Bridge from Russia’s Krasnodar region to Russian-occupied Crimea has reached 13 km (8.1 miles).

The traffic jam began building up on Friday, amid security checks instituted after Ukraine’s June 22 strike on the Chonhar Bridge between the Russian-occupied areas of the Kherson region and Crimea.

Volunteers are distributing up to five tons of water per day. Doctors and rescuers of the Ministry of Emergency Situations are on duty.

The Russian proxy leader in the occupied areas of the Kherson region, Andrey Alekseyenko, claimed on Telegram that the damaged Chongar Bridge has been repaired: “Transport communication between the Kherson region and the Crimea through Chongar…has been completely restored.”

UPDATE 0845 GMT:

The Ukraine Air Force says it destroyed 13 of 17 Iranian-made attack drones fired by Russia overnight. The rest did not reach their targets.

UPDATE 0837 GMT:

A US Marine Corps veteran is among 13 people killed by a Russian missile strike on a pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine on June 27.

Relatives of Ian Tortorici confirmed his death. He arrived in Ukraine in March 2022 and took part in combat operations as a member of the International Legion.

UPDATE 0821 GMT:

Russian State TV is continuing the Kremlin’s campaign to discredit Yevgeny Prigozhin, after the June 23 rebellion of his Wagner Group mercenaries seized the city of Rostov-on-Don and advanced on Moscow.

In his flagship show on Sunday, Dmitry Kiselev declared that Prigozhin went “off the rails” after receiving more than $9 billion in public funds: “He thought that he can challenge the Defense Ministry, the state itself, and the President personally.”

Having portrayed Wagner as a “private” military company for years, Vladimir Putin said last week that the Russian State funded the mercenaries.

Kiselev did not explain why Putin had made the mistake of bankrolling a group which would turn against him. Instead, the commentator recited the Kremlin’s mantra of “unity” following the June 24 deal ending the rebellion, with Prigozhin going to neighboring Belarus.

However, at least one commentator, Sergey Mardan, was unsettled by the shift in propaganda from Wagner as heroes to Wagner as useless.

Wagner has confirmed the suspension of its recruitment of new mercenaries, saying it is part of “temporary non-participation” in the invasion of Ukraine and its relocation to neighboring Belarus.

UPDATE 0807 GMT:

Ukraine’s counter-offensive has gained another 65.8 square km (25.4 square miles) in the south and east of the country, says Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar.

Maliar said 37.4 square km (14.4 square miles) was liberated in the east as troops advanced further near Bakhmut.

The gains followed the reclamation of 9 square km over the past week as Ukrainian forces concentrated on “improving the operational position and aligning the frontline”.

Meanwhile, the forces continue to repel Russian attacks in “heavy fighting” in the directions of Lyman, Avdiivka, and Mariinka.

In the south, Ukraine has regained 28.4 square km (11 square miles) of territory. That brings the total of liberation area to 158.4 square km (61.2 square miles).

UPDATE 0748 GMT:

Andrei Kartapolov, head of the Defense Committee of Russia’s Duma, has maintained that there is no need for a further mobilization to replace the mercenaries of the Wagner Group.

Wagner launched a mini-rebellion on June 23, shaking the rule of Vladimir Putin and removing tens of thousands of fighters from the frontline in Ukraine.

Kartapolov said, “There is no threat at all regarding a drop in the combat potential, both in the mid-term and long-term perspective.”

UPDATE 0734 GMT:

A senior Russian legislator has effectively acknowledged the transfer of 700,000 Ukrainian children into Russia or Russian-occupied territory.

Grigory Karasin, the head of the International Committee in Russia’s Federation Council, posted on Telegram, “In recent years, 700,000 children have found refuge with us, fleeing the bombing and shelling from the conflict areas in Ukraine.”

In July 2022, the US estimated that Russia had “forcibly deported” 260,000 children. Ukraine’s Integration Ministry says 19,492 Ukrainian children are considered illegally deported.

On March 17, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants over the deportations for Vladimir Putin and Russia’s “children’s rights commissioner” Maria Lvova-Belova.

ORIGINAL ENTRY: Award-winning Ukrainian writer and war crimes researcher Victoria Amelina is the 13th person murdered in a Russian missile strike on a pizza restaurant on June 27.

Amelina, 37, died of her wounds on Sunday.

The Russian attack destroyed the Ria Pizza restaurant — popular with residents and Ukrainian and foreign journalists — in Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine. Twelve civilians, including four children, were slain at the time and about 60 wounded.

Amelina was having dinner with a delegation of Colombian writers, journalists, and politicians, three of whom were injured.

The freedom of expression organization PEN Ukraine posted, “With our greatest pain, we inform you that Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina passed away on July 1st in Mechnikov Hospital in Dnipro….In the last days of Victoria’s life, her closest people and friends were with her.”

Amelina was working with the human rights initiative Truth Hounds to document Russian war crimes through northern, eastern, and southern Ukraine.

She was also completing her first non-fiction book in English. War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War profiles Ukrainian women who are documenting Russian war crimes.

“We Just Need The Truth”

Soon after Russia’s invasion in February, Amelina volunteered for humanitarian work.

The war did not take long to reach her. The windows in her mother’s apartment in Lviv were shattered when a Russian missile struck the nearby tank repair plant. Some of her friends were among the invasion’s victims.

“We thought that anything could happen back then,” Amelina told the Kyiv Independent in April. “Even a Russian offensive from Belarus with Lviv as the main target seemed possible.”

Walking along Zamarstynivska Street, once the home of the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin who coined the term “genocide”, she decided that she wanted to research the war crimes that were already being committed. She joined the human rights organization Truth Hounds, which has documented rights violations and crimes since 2014 in in Ukraine, eastern Europe and central Asia.

During their investigation near Izyum, liberated by Ukrainian forces last September, Amelina found a diary of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a celebrated children’s literature writer killed by the Russians.

Vakulenko, who remained in the village of Kapitolivka to care for his disabled son, was taken away by the Russians on March 24, 2022. He was never seen again.

Vakulenko’s father and Amelina found the writer’s diary, which he managed to bury near a cherry tree in the yard before the Russians came for him.

In the final entry in the diary, now in the Kharkiv Literary Museum, Vakulenko wrote, “Everything will be Ukraine! I believe in victory.”

Amelina later said, “As a writer, I feel this gesture and it hurts me a lot: It is the last attempt of a writer to speak and be heard, read.”

She continued:

We just need the truth….

This is a prerequisite for lasting peace, healing survivors and witnesses’ trauma, and completing Ukraine’s democratic transformation. We need to stay healthy and live long enough to witness all the trials.

“So Many Books Unwritten, Stories Untold, Days Unlived”

Amelina was born on January 1, 1986, in Lviv in western Ukraine. While still in school, she moved to Canada with her father, but soon decided to return to her native country. In 2007, she received her master’s in computer technology from Lviv Polytechnic University, and pursued a 10-year career with international IT companies.

In 2014 she published her first novel, The November Syndrom, or Homo Compatiens. The book was in the Top 10 prose books rated by LitAktsent, a Ukrainian literature website. It was republished the next year and made the shortlist of the Valeriy Shevchuk Prize.

Leaving IT and writing full time, Amelina published her first children’s book, Somebody, in 2016. Her second novel, Dom’s Dream Kingdom (Dim dlya Doma), was published in 2017 and shortlisted for national and international awards.

A children’s book, Storie-e-es of Eka the Excavator, followed in 2021. About the same time, Amelina founded the New York Literature Festival in the town of New York in the Donetsk region in eastenr Ukraine.

In 2021 her achievements and potential were recognized with the Joseph Conrad-Korzeniowski literature prize.