TOP HEADLINES
• Ukrainian forces have pulled back to the outskirts of the industrial city of Sievierodonetsk amid a fierce Russian assault, the regional governor said, another key moment in one of the most intense battles of the conflict.
• Two people were killed and two wounded in Luhansk region in the past 24 hours, five civilians were injured in the Donetsk region, and four were killed and 11 wounded in the Kharkiv region, according to the Ukrainian president’s office.
• More than 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers who surrendered in the city of Mariupol have been transferred to Russia for investigation, a Russian law enforcement source told the state-owned Tass news agency.
• Ukraine and Russia have each handed over the bodies of 50 of their deceased soldiers in an exchange that included 37 Ukrainian soldiers killed at Mariupol’s Azovstal steelworks, according to the Ukrainian Ministry for Reintegration.
• Ukraine says around 600 people are being held prisoner for resisting Russian occupation in the Kherson region, claiming that they were being tortured. Kherson was the first major Ukrainian city to fall in early March, with videos emerging of residents staging defiant protests against Russian forces.
• Russian and Turkish defense ministers are discussing a potential grain export corridor from Ukraine and northern Syria, according to Turkey’s defense ministry, while Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is in Ankara for two days to discuss unblocking grain exports and the wider Ukraine conflict.
• However, Turkish efforts to ease a global food crisis by negotiating safe passage for grain stuck in Black Sea ports has met resistance as Ukraine said Russia was imposing unreasonable conditions while Lavrov said no action was required from Moscow because it had already made the necessary commitments.
• The deputy head of Ukraine’s agriculture producers union has accused Russia of stealing about 600,000 tonnes of grain from occupied Ukrainian territory and exporting some of it.
• Russian-backed separatists proxies in occupied parts of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia province have announced plans to stage a referendum on joining Russia at an unspecified date later this year.
• Microsoft is making substantial cuts to its business in Russia, joining a string of companies that are reducing their activity or pulling out of the country following its actions in Ukraine.
• Russian lawmakers have finalized Moscow’s exit from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights after the body that founded the court expelled Russia in March over its actions in Ukraine.
• The global economy risks falling into a harmful period of 1970s-style “stagflation” sparked by the Ukraine conflict, according to the World Bank, which has signed off on $1.49 billion of additional financing for Ukraine to help pay government and social workers’ wages.
• Brad Pitt has accused his ex-wife Angelina Jolie of seeking to “inflict harm” on him by selling her 50 percent stake in their French vineyard to a Russian oligarch with “poisonous associations and intentions.”
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