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Russian forces have taken most of Sievierodonetsk, where fierce street fighting continues after a fire broke out at the Azot chemical plant, where hundreds of civilians are sheltering. “The key tactical goal of the occupiers has not changed: they are pressing in Sievierodonetsk, severe fighting is ongoing there – literally for every metre,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address, adding that Russia’s military was trying to deploy reserve forces to the Donbas region. Ukrainian troops reportedly remain in control of an industrial area.
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Russia’s defence ministry said its cruise missiles destroyed a large depot containing US and European weapons in Ternopil in western Ukraine on Sunday. The strike destroyed a “large depot of anti-tank missile systems, portable air defence systems and shells provided to the Kyiv regime by the US and European countries”, the ministry said, a claim disputed by Ukrainian officials who said no weapons were stored there. Ternopil’s regional governor said the attack destroyed a number of residential buildings and injured 22 people, including seven women and a 12-year-old.
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Russian forces destroyed a bridge connecting the embattled eastern city of Sievierodonetsk to its twin city of Lysychansk, cutting off a possible evacuation route for civilians, according to local officials. Serhiy Haidai, the governor of Luhansk province, said on Sunday that the Russian military had destroyed a bridge over the Siverskyi River that linked the two cities.
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Amnesty International has accused Russia of war crimes in Ukraine’s second largest city of Kharkiv. Hundreds of civilians have been killed by indiscriminate Russian shelling using widely banned cluster munitions and inherently inaccurate rockets, the agency said in a new report published on Monday. “Russian forces launched a relentless campaign of indiscriminate bombardments against Kharkiv. They shelled residential neighbourhoods almost daily, killing and injuring hundreds of civilians and causing wholesale destruction, often using widely banned cluster munitions.”
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Security concerns raised by Turkey in its opposition to Finland’s and Sweden’s Nato membership applications are legitimate, Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg said. “These are legitimate concerns. This is about terrorism, it’s about weapons exports,” Stoltenberg told a news conference in Finland on Sunday.
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A former British soldier has died fighting Russian forces in Sievierodonetsk. The British Foreign Office confirmed Jordan Gatley was shot and killed in Ukraine. He left the British army in March “to continue his career as a soldier in other areas” and had been helping Ukrainian troops defend their country against Russia, his father, Dean, wrote in a statement posted on Facebook.
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Friends and family of Brahim Saadoun – the 21-year-old Moroccan sentenced to death alongside two Britons last week – have called for his freedom, telling the Guardian he was an active-duty marine and not a mercenary, as claimed by Russian media and pro-Russia officials in eastern Ukraine who announced the sentence.
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Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced on Sunday the possibility of new talks with Russian president Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy. “Perhaps in the next week, we will talk about what steps we will take, by holding talks with both Mr Putin and Zelenskiy,” he said in regards to solutions for impeded exports as a result of the war.