June 21, 2023 - Russia-Ukraine news

Russia claimed on Wednesday that its forces had attacked units of the Ukrainian army in the area of the Vremivka ledge – one of the epicenters of fighting, located in the southeast of the country near the border of the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions – and destroyed their equipment. 

"As a result of the strike, one tank, an infantry fighting vehicle and three armored fighting vehicles were destroyed," it added.

According to the ministry, Russian troops repelled two attacks of the 65th Mechanized Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the areas of Novodanilivka and Yablukove settlements in the Zaporizhzhia region. 

The Russian defense ministry said it struck advancing columns and "the accumulation of manpower and equipment" in three Zaporizhzhia region towns.

The ministry also claimed that Russian forces stopped "the activities of three Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups" in the area of three other settlements in the region.

What Ukraine says: Earlier on Wednesday, a senior Ukrainian defense official claimed that Kyiv’s troops were “entrenching themselves” on the southern front, while continuing to conduct “offensive operations” in the direction of two Russian-held cities that lie deep into occupied territory.

CNN cannot independently verify battlefield reports. 

The footage is grainy and disturbing. A Ukrainian soldier from the 73rd Naval Special Operations Center fights his way through a trench, apparently on the southern front, shooting Russian soldiers repeatedly at point-blank range. The dust kicked up adds to the sense of chaos, and the dense panic and brutality of this counteroffensive’s start. 

It was never going to be simple, and would always involve the sort of ghastly, face-to-face combat shown in the special forces video. But the success of Ukraine’s onslaught still rests on whether it can surprise and outwit Moscow’s forces — not in grinding close combat, but on a larger strategic level. And this is likely why we are seeing a slow — and at times incremental — start to this first phase of open operations.

At present, Ukraine appears to be keeping its options open. The priority is progress along the expansive southern front, which marks the valuable land corridor between occupied Crimea and the Donbas, and the Russian mainland. Most observers agree it is the singular goal of this counteroffensive to break that land bridge.

A Crimean peninsula isolated from the Donbas is much harder to resupply and defend, leaving Russian President Vladimir Putin with a stark choice: expose his military assets in Crimea to a long standoff, or cut his losses and pull them back.

Few analysts contend he can stomach the latter, and so we may face a long siege of the peninsula over the winter months, as Kyiv returns Moscow to the boundaries it stole in 2014-15, or worse. It is arguably a symbolic defeat for Moscow (and a definable victory for Kyiv) to see Russia’s past 16 months of carnage and losses end in no strategic gain.

The question for July is how this is achieved. 

Read the full analysis here.

The destruction in flooded parts of the Russian-occupied town of Hola Prystan is “catastrophic” and bodies are still under the rubble, the settlement’s Ukrainian military administration said in a Telegram post on Wednesday. 

The town was flooded following the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam in the southern Kherson region on June 6. Russia and Ukraine have both blamed each other for the collapse.

There is no gas and electricity supply in most of the town, it said, and sewage systems in parts of the town are still underwater.

The post said that some residents had to cook “on fires in their yards.” 

World leaders pledged international support for Ukraine's economic and social recovery from Russia's invasion, as part of a wide-ranging conference on Wednesday hosted by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in London.

Here's the latest map of control:

Moscow said that US President Joe Biden’s comparison of Chinese President Xi Jinping to “dictators” demonstrated the “unpredictability” of US foreign policy, in comments made on fractured diplomatic ties between Washington and Beijing — a key ally of Russia.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Russia has "its own very bad relations" with the US, while it had “very good relations” with China.

Some context: Peskov's remarks followed Biden's comparison of Chinese President Xi Jinping to “dictators,” during a political fundraiser in California Tuesday night.

The unscripted remarks followed US Secretary of State Antony Blinken's assertion that his recent trip to Beijing had yielded “progress” in repairing the fractured relationship between both nations.

The president’s apparently off-message remarks came amid a particularly tense time in US-China relations.

CNN's Sam Fossum, Jasmine Wright and Priscilla Alvarez contributed reporting.

Belarus has renounced its neutrality and removed the wording on its non-nuclear status in light of external threats, a senior official said this week, as the threat of atomic arsenal held by Russia and its allies looms over the war in Ukraine.

"We are also considering the adoption of a new military doctrine that will give clear answers to the questions related to unfriendly countries,” the Deputy Head of the Faculty of the Belarusian General Staff Colonel Andrey Bogodel said this week, according to state news agency BelTa.

On Wednesday, the Belarusian Ministry of Defense also announced its annual mobilization exercise, which is being held from June 21 to June 30 with the military members in Minsk.

Some background: Officials in Belarus, one of Moscow's few remaining allies amid the war in Ukraine, have ramped up rhetoric on the country's nuclear capabilities in recent weeks.

Last week, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said the country will start receiving tactical nuclear weapons from Russia in a “few days," and that the weapons would be a "deterrent" to potential security treats.

On Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that more nuclear weapons will be sent to Belarus throughout the summer as a warning to Western countries for supporting Ukraine.

CNN's Mariya Knight, Uliana Pavlova and Helen Regan contributed reporting.

Russian activist Yaroslav Shirshikov, has been released from pretrial detention, according to state news agency TASS.

“Yaroslav was released on bail. The investigation of the criminal case is ongoing. The investigator's decision is legal and well-founded,” TASS cited Shirshikov's lawyer, Fyodor Akchermyshev, as saying on Tuesday.

The investigation into the criminal case is still ongoing, according to TASS.

Shirshikov was arrested by Russian authorities and charged with justifying terrorism due to a social media post regarding the death of Russian pro-war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky.

In a Telegram post, Shirshikov expressed a lack of sympathy for Tatarsky's death using strong language.

Some background: Shirshikov is known as one of the first individuals to report on the arrest of Wall Street Journal journalist Evan Gershkovich in Yekaterinburg in late March. He told CNN that Gershkovich was looking into a number of stories and had texted him to say he was returning to the city. According to Shirshikov, they had met prior to Gershkovich's arrest.

Gershkovich, detained while on a reporting trip to Yekaterinburg, became the first American journalist to be arrested in Russia on spying charges since the end of the Cold War.

The Biden administration has called for his release, maintaining that he was "wrongfully detained."

Ukraine’s troops are conducting “offensive operations” in the direction of two Russian-held cities, a Ukrainian defense official said on Wednesday.

Deputy defense minister Hanna Maliar said on Telegram that Ukrainian forces over the past day "had partial success, entrenching themselves on the achieved front lines and leveling the front line.”

Melitopol and Berdyansk are two Ukrainian cities that lie deep in Russian-occupied territory.

In eastern Ukraine, the country’s forces are holding back what Maliar described as “a large-scale” Russian offensive in the direction of Lyman – where there is “particularly heavy fighting” – and Bakhmut.

Russian offensive actions are focused on the east as they try “to reach the borders of Donetsk and Luhansk regions," Maliar said.

Russia's counter-drone measures have successfully thwarted a Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) attack near a military base outside of Moscow Wednesday, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. 

"There was an attack, the counter-drone means coped with their task. Now the relevant authorities are investigating [the incident]," Peskov told journalists. 

The Russian Ministry of Defense disclosed in a statement that it had foiled “an attempted terrorist attack by the Kyiv regime on targets in the Moscow region with three aircraft-type UAVs.”

“All the UAVs were suppressed by electronic warfare, as a result of which they lost control and crashed,” the statement posted on Telegram said.

According to the Russian defense ministry, there were no casualties or damage resulting from the attack.

Some background: Ukraine rarely comments on attacks on Russian soil, which have ramped up in recent months as the war increasingly comes home to the Russian people.

Last month, Russia blamed Ukraine for launching a drone attack on Moscow which reportedly left two people injured and several buildings damaged.

In early May, two UAVs were destroyed over the Kremlin in what Moscow claimed was an attempt to target Russian President Vladimir Putin. Kyiv forcefully denied the allegation.

Sources told CNN earlier this month that Kyiv has cultivated a network of agents and sympathizers inside Russia working to carry out acts of sabotage against Russian targets and has provided them with drones to stage attacks.