Here is the situation on Sunday, July 7, 2024.

Fighting

Russian shelling killed three civilians in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, officials said. Prosecutors said two bodies were recovered from the rubble of a house that came under fire in a village near Beryslav. Meanwhile, the region’s governor, Oleksander Prokudin, said an artillery strike in the evening killed one person in a village south of Kherson.

Ukraine said its air defence systems destroyed all 13 drones that Russia launched. The air force said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app that Russia also launched two Iskander ballistic missiles, but it did not say what happened to the weapons.

Citing the Russian Ministry of Defence, state news agencies claimed that Iskander ballistic missiles destroyed two launchers for Patriot surface-to-air missile systems in Ukraine’s Odesa region.

The Russian Defence Ministry said seven drones were intercepted over the Belgorod region, which is subjected to near-daily Ukrainian attacks.

A resident of Yasynuvata town in the Donetsk region stands in front of her house damaged by shelling, which local Russian-installed authorities called a Ukrainian military attack [Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters]

Alexei Smirnov, governor of Kursk, further north and west, also reported seven drones had been downed over the region. He said Ukrainian forces had shelled about 10 villages over the course of the day.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian General Staff said Ukrainian and Russian forces clashed 45 times near Pokrovsk over the previous day. Hours later, the Russian Defence Ministry announced its troops had captured a village some 30km (19 miles) east of the city.
Russian strikes left some 100,000 households without power in northern Ukraine and cut off the water supply to a regional capital, Ukrainian authorities reported, while civilian casualties rose sharply in the country’s embattled east. The northern Sumy region, which borders Russia, was plunged into darkness after Russian strikes starting late on Friday damaged energy infrastructure, the Ukrainian Ministry of Energy said.

Weapons

Ukraine’s air force duped Russian troops into deploying missiles against sophisticated mock-up weapons and military equipment put in place to look like military targets, its commander Mykola Oleshchuk said. A video attached to his Telegram post, described as footage from a Russian reconnaissance drone, showed what Oleshchuk said were Russian Iskander missiles attacking the simulated weapons.