As the war enters its 871st day, these are the main developments.
Here’s where the war stands on Monday, July 15, 2024:
Fighting
- Russia has downed 22 Ukrainian drones overnight in the west of the country and over Crimea, Moscow’s Ministry of Defence said. Fifteen drones were shot down over the Russian border region of Bryansk, six over Crimea, and one over Lipetsk. Separately, the governor of Kursk said three more Ukrainian drones had been downed there.
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Russia’s Defence Ministry claimed its forces had taken control of the village of Urozhaine in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, which if confirmed would be the latest in a series of gains since capturing the strategic town of Avdiivka in February.
- Urozhaine was one of the few areas that Ukraine won back during its 2023 offensive. But Russia has been slowly taking territory in eastern Ukraine since that failed Ukrainian counteroffensive, as Kyiv’s troops struggle with shortages of munitions and manpower.
Troops and weapons
- Ukraine ramps up mobilisation to replenish troop numbers more than 28 months since Russia’s invasion. But Ukrainian men are becoming less eager to fight amid waning public enthusiasm for wartime service. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has lowered the draft age to 25 from 27 in April and signed off on an overhaul of the mobilisation process that entered force in May.
- A network of laboratories in hundreds of secret workshops across Ukraine is reportedly leveraging innovation to create a robot army that the country hopes will kill Russian troops and save its own wounded soldiers and civilians. Defence startups across the country – about 250 according to industry estimates – are reportedly creating the killing machines at secret locations that typically look like rural car repair shops, according to an Associated Press news investigation.
- According to the report, one company can manufacture an unmanned ground vehicle called the Odyssey in four days, at a price tag of $35,000, or roughly 10 percent of the cost of an imported model.
- The use of unmanned weapons, however, has raised concerns with experts saying that the use of drones and artificial intelligence in weapons could reduce the barrier to killing and dramatically escalate conflicts. Human Rights Watch and other international rights groups are calling for a ban on weapons that exclude human decision-making, a concern echoed by the UN General Assembly and other technology experts.
Politics
- Ten years after Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was blasted from the sky over separatist-held pro-Russian territory in Ukraine, families of the victims will gather on Wednesday to remember the tragedy as hopes fade that those responsible will soon be behind bars. The doomed flight took off on a bright summer’s day on July 17, 2014. A Dutch court has sentenced in absentia three men to life imprisonment for their roles in bringing down the plane, during the early stages of a war that saw Moscow seize the Crimean Peninsula.
Sport
- Several hundred people marched in central Paris to honour Ukrainian athletes who died in the war with Russia before they had a chance to compete in the Paris Olympics. Waving flags and wearing T-shirts with pictures of top athletes killed in the battle with the Russian invaders, demonstrators called on Russian and Belarussian competitors to be banned from the Games opening on July 26.
