Russian journalist and dissident Vladmir Kara-Murza during his trial in 2023


Saturday’s Coverage: Kyiv Strikes More Oil Depots Inside Russia


Map: Institute for the Study of War


UPDATE 1724 GMT:

Leaked documents from the US Department of Defense estimate that between 462,000 and 728,000 Russian soldiers have been killed, injured, or captured by mid-June 2024 in Vladimir Putin’s 28-month invasion of Ukraine.

The figures exceed the strength of the invading Russian force in February 2022. The casualties are greater than the total suffered by the Russian military suffered since World War II.

The Economist, which obtained the documents, summarizes, “The latest estimates suggest that roughly 2% of all Russian men aged between 20 and 50 may have been either killed or severely wounded in Ukraine since the start of the full-scale war.”

On Friday, indepedent Russian media outlets Meduza and Mediazona published an investigation, using the Register of Inheritance Cases, confirming around 120,000 Russian troops killed in the invasion.

Examining public records in Russia, Mediazona has identified 58,207 slain Russian soldiers as of June 21.


UPDATE 1718 GMT:

Ukrainian forces have downed yet another Russian Su-25 fighter jet in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine.

The Khortytsia Group said the Su-25, a heavily-armored ground attack aircraft which provides close support to Russia’s offensive, was destroyed by anti-aircraft gunners and is now “burning in the steppes of Ukrainian Donbas”.

Ukrainian defenders have countered the Russian operations by shooting down six Su-25s in May and two in June.


UPDATE 1214 GMT:

Ukrainian drones have set afire an ammunition depot in the Voronezh region in western Russia.

Voronezh Governor Alexander Gusev claimed several drones were “destroyed”, but said debris and the detonation of “explosive objects” set off the blaze.

Gusev asserted that there were no casualties, but authorities declared a state of emergency in the village of Podgorensky, evacuating residents to temporary accommodation.

A Ukrainian defense official said that “the enemy stored surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, shells for tanks and artillery and boxes of ammunition” at the site, leading to a “powerful” explosion.


UPDATE 0955 GMT:

Kyiv has restored two-thirds of power generating capacity after Russia’s intense missile and drone strikes this spring, says the deputy head of the capital’s administration.

Petro Pantelieiev said more than half of Kyiv’s capacity was damaged by the Russian assaults.

He explained, “We are planning to decentralize the electricity and heat production system by building small and medium-sized thermal power plants.”

Local authorities are developing a cluster of autonomous facilities to cope with possible power outages.

All the city’s hospitals are equipped with generators, more than 100 boiler houses of the district heating system have generators, and 175 pump rooms can also be quickly connected to autonomous power sources.


UPDATE 0820 GMT:

Eight civilians were killed and 16 injured by Russian attacks across Ukraine on Saturday.

In the Kherson region in southern Ukraine, four civilians were slain and three injured by Russian shelling.

Two bodies were recovered in the morning from the rubble of a house in a village near Beryslav, north of Kherson city. An artillery strike in the evening killed one person in a village south of the town.

In the Donetsk region in the east, two people were killed and eight injured.

In the neighboring Kharkiv region, a 47-year-old man was killed and a woman wounded.

Ukrainian air defenses downed all 13 Iran-type drones launched by Russia overnight on the Kirovohrad, Kharkiv, Sumy, and Poltava regions.

Moscow’s forces also fired two Iskander-M ballistic missiles from the Kursk region in southwest Russia.


ORIGINAL ENTRY: Russian political prisoner Vladimir Kara-Murza has been hospitalized in the penal colony in the Omsk region in eastern Russia, because of “a sharp deterioration in his health”.

The journalist’s wife Evgenia and one of his lawyers reported the development on Friday, five months after the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in a Siberian penal colony.

Kara-Murza’s lawyers went to Penal Colony No. 6 on Thursday to visit him, but were turned away after hours of waiting by prison officials who revealed the transfer to the hospital. The attorneys were turned away by hospital staff on Thursday and Friday.

Evgenia Kara-Murza told The Associated Press on Friday that, according to prison officials, her husband was transferred to the hospital for an unspecified “examination”.

We don’t have any information about what state Volodya is in, why he was really transferred to the hospital and what is really happening. And, unfortunately, we won’t have (any information) until next week, because during the weekend Russia’s entire penitentiary system is closed.

One of the most prominent dissidents in Russia, Kara-Murza, 42, was seized by security forces in April 2022, weeks after the start of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. He was charged with disseminating “fake news” about the Russian military over his condemnation of the war. In July 2022, prosecution began over participation in the activities of an “undesirable organization”, and the charge soon escalated to treason.

In April 2023, he was condemned to 25 years in prison, the maximum sentence requested by prosecutors.

In 2015 and 2017, Kara-Murza was almost killed by poisonings. He developed polyneuropathy, which deadens the feeling in his limbs. The condition has worsened as the journalist spent months in solitary confinement.

Evgenia said Kara-Murza’s lawyers “haven’t noticed any sharp deterioration in health during recent visits”, but “little by little, it only gets worse”. The political prisoner had some treatment in pre-trial detention in Moscow, but none at the penal colony in Omsk: “There is a prescription, there is medication which they should have been administering, but when the lawyer came to the colony with the medication, they said they don’t have the equipment to administer the medication [intravenously].”