The Reikartz Hotel in Zaporizhzhia in southern Ukraine, heavily damaged by a Russia missile strike, August 10, 2023

Thursday’s Coverage: 1 Killed, 60+ Wounded in Mystery Explosion at Military Plant Near Moscow

Map: Institute for Study of War

UPDATE 1705 GMT:

The US has sanctioned four members of the supervisory board of the Alfa Group Consortium, one of the largest financial and investment groups in Russia.

The quartet are Petr Aven, the chairman of the board of a Russia-based insurance company; Mikhail Maratovich Fridman, founder of the Alfa Group and chair of a committee of the Russian Association of Employers and Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP); German Khan, chairman of the board of a Russian construction company; and Alexey Kuzmichev.

The US also blacklisted the RSPP as an entity.

UPDATE 1658 GMT:

Gyunduz Mamedov, the former Ukraine Deputy Prosecutor General, has written about the 8-year-old boy killed this morning in a Russian missile strike on Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine:

UPDATE 1330 GMT:

Mediazona and the BBC Russian Service, working with a team of volunteers, have used open data to confirm the identity of 30,003 Russian soldiers who died in Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The journalists have added 1,351 servicemen to the list in the last two weeks, with a slightly larger than usual increase in those from missile forces and artillery.

Lt. Colonels Yegor Boldyrev, Andrey Koval, Anatoly Matinov, and Sergey Savenok are among the additions, bringing the total to 284 high-ranking officers.

In July, the independent Russian outlets Meduza and Mediazona published a joint study of statistical data to estimate the deaths of 47,000 Russian servicemen in Ukraine from February 24, 2022 to the end of May 2023. The total is three times more than Soviet losses during the war in Afghanistan, and nine times more than the losses during the first Chechen War from December 1994 to August 1996.

The Ukrainian military says Russia has lost 252,780 troops.

UPDATE 1158 GMT:

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has dismissed all regional chiefs of Ukrainian military recruitment.

Zelenskiy told a meeting of the National Security and Defence Council that the step was necessary because of “112 criminal proceedings against officials of ‘military commissars’ – as well as 33 suspicions”.

This system should be run by people who know exactly what war is and why cynicism and bribery during war is treason.

Soldiers who have passed the front or who cannot be in the trenches because they have lost their health and lost their limbs — but have preserved their dignity and do not have cynicism — are the ones who can be entrusted with this system.

UPDATE 1156 GMT:

Video of a Ukrainian strike on a Russian military position on the eastern front in the Donetsk region:

UPDATE 1150 GMT:

An 8-year-old boy has been killed in a Russian rocket attack on Prykarpattia in the Ivano-Frankivsk region.

Governor Svitlana Onyshchuk posted on Telegram that a rocket hit a home where a family with three children lived.

Other Ukrainian officials said Russia fired four KH-47 Khinzal missiles, among the most difficult to intercept. One was downed, but one struck the house.

UPDATE 1145 GMT:

A 53-year-old man has been killed and two civilians — a woman and a 44-year-old man — injured in the latest Russian artillery attacks on Kherson city in southern Ukraine.

Russia’s Defense Ministry, with no evidence, is proclaiming that 20 Ukrainian soldiers have been slain.

UPDATE 0844 GMT:

A drone has exploded near the Karamyshevskaya embankment in Moscow.

Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said there were no injuries or serious damage.

UPDATE 0724 GMT:

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko reports on a Russian attack on the capital this morning:

Fragments of a rocket fell on the territory of one of the capital’s children’s hospitals. There were no injuries or damage. Emergency services are on the scene.

Klitschko said the roof of a private house was damaged and a wreck was discovered in an open area in a summer cooperative in the Obolon district.

UPDATE 0710 GMT:

Speaking with EA WorldView, political analyst Monique Camarra offers a possible motive for Russia’s targeting of hotels:

There are roughly 10 hotels in the whole of the Donbas in eastern Ukraine, including three in Kramatorsk, one in Sloviansk, one in Druzhkivka, one in Kostantinivka, and one in Pokrovsk. There are three hotels in Zaporizhzhia.

Pretty soon the insurance companies will stop providing cover for journalists going to Ukraine.

“For the Russians, the press is the enemy. They do not want their crimes to be recorded and known to the whole world,” explains Oksana Romanyuk, executive director of the Kyiv-based Mass Media Institute.

The chief international correspondent of London’s Independent, Bel Trew, notes that the Druzhba Hotel and the restaurant struck in Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine on Monday were known for hosting journalists and humanitarian aid workers. She says the attack “looks like a pattern.”

Peter Beaumont, the senior correspondent of The Guardian, says the strikes are “very much not a coincidence”.

From Christopher Miller of the Financial Times:

ORIGINAL ENTRY: Russia has hit another hotel in a missile strike, killing at least one civilian and injuring 16 others, including four children.

The missile struck the Reikartz Hotel, in the center of Zaporizhzhia city in southern Ukraine, about 7:20 p.m.

Video showed a large crater, wrecked cars, and heavy damage to the four-story hotel — used by UN staff when they worked in the city — on the bank of the Dnipro River.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy reacted:

On Monday, Russia hit the Drozhba Hotel in Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine, 43 minutes after a strike on a nearby apartment building and restaurant.

The hotel was largely empty, but the “double tap” attack killed at least nine people and wounded 81. One rescuer was killed and among the injured were 38 emergency responders and police officers.

See also Ukraine War, Day 531: Russia Kills 7+ Civilians, Wounds 81+ in “Double Tap” Attack on Apartment Block and Hotel

The strike was also the second Russian killing in Zaporizhzhia in two days. On Wednesday, a missile slew three civilians — two young women and a man — and wounded nine.

A video of Svitlana Semeykina and Khrystyna Spitsyna, 21 and 19 years old, singing in Zaporizhzhia city just before they were killed: