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Ukrainian troops advance on Izyum; 80,000 Russians may have been killed, wounded in war

Ukrainian troops are advancing toward the key city of Izyum, placing strain on Russian forces. Washington estimates that up to 80,000 Russian troops have been killed or injured during the full-scale war in Ukraine. Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.

Key developments

• Ukrainian troops are “moving very successfully” toward Izyum in the northeast, putting further pressure on Russian troops, Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said in a YouTube video. The city of 50,000 is seen as the gateway to the eastern Donbas region, most of which is held by pro-Russian forces.
• Between 70,000 and 80,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded during the conflict, Colin Kahl, the U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, said at a Monday briefing. The figure is “pretty remarkable,” he said, “considering that the Russians have achieved none of [Russian President] Vladimir Putin’s objectives at the beginning of the war.”
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is accusing Russia of “nuclear blackmail” following recent attacks on Europe’s largest nuclear power plant that the United Nations has warned could lead to catastrophic consequences. In his nightly address, Zelensky called on other nations to impose harsher sanctions on Russia for creating “the threat of nuclear disaster,” as Ukraine and Russia blame each other for attacks on the plant in Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine.
• Air defense systems will be deployed at the nuclear power plant, Russia-appointed Zaporizhzhia regional Governor Yevgeny Balitsky said.

Global impact

• The Kremlin said any attempt to isolate Russians had no future after Zelensky called for Western nations to ban entry for all Russian nationals in a wide-ranging interview with The Washington Post. “The most important sanctions are to close the borders,” he told The Post’s Isabelle Khurshudyan in Kyiv, adding that Russians should “live in their own world until they change their philosophy.”
• Two more grain ships sailed Tuesday under a deal brokered by the United Nations and facilitated by Turkey. One ship is destined for South Korea, the other headed to Turkey, the Black Sea Grain Initiative Joint Coordination Center said in a statement. The ships are carrying a combined total of 70,020 metric tons of foodstuffs.
• A Russian rocket has successfully launched an Iranian satellite into orbit, the Associated Press reported Tuesday. The technology will help Tehran to spy on military targets across the Middle East — but first, Moscow intends to use the spacecraft over Ukraine, The Washington Post reported last week.
• The United States has obtained a warrant for the seizure of a $90 million aircraft owned by sanctioned Russian oligarch Andrei Skoch, the Department of Justice announced Monday. “The airplane is subject to seizure and forfeiture based on probable cause of violation of the federal anti-money laundering laws,” officials said.

Battlefield updates

• Russia’s assaults on the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut have been its most successful axis in the Donbas region in the past 30 days, Britain’s Ministry of Defense said, although it noted that Russian troops have gained only 10 kilometers (six miles) during that time frame. “In other Donbas sectors where Russia was attempting to break through, its forces have not gained more than 3km [1.8 miles] during this 30 day period; almost certainly significantly less than planned.”
• In the Kharkiv region, at least a dozen settlements came under Russian artillery, tank and aircraft fire, the Ukrainian military said in its latest update. But Ukrainian forces claimed to have captured the town of Dovhenke. Several villages in the northern Sumy region also came under intense Russian fire.
• The Pentagon will send Ukraine an additional $1 billion in military assistance, including tens of thousands more munitions and explosives — the largest such package since Russia launched its invasion in February, The Post’s Karoun Demirjian reports in Washington.
• The Pentagon has acknowledged supplying missiles designed to target Russian antiaircraft radar systems in Ukraine. “We’ve included a number of anti-radiation missiles that can be fired off of Ukrainian aircraft that can have effects on Russia radars and other things,” Kahl told a news briefing, without specifying the exact type.

Bodies are exhumed from a mass grave containing corpses of civilians

killed during the Russian occupation in Bucha

 on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine

08-08-2022. (Heidi Levine/FTWP)

From our correspondents on the ground

Accounting of bodies in Bucha nears completion. It’s the closest accounting of victims from Russia’s occupation of the Kyiv suburb, officials say. The Washington Post’s Liz Sly reports that “after months of meticulous, painful and at times gruesome investigation … [the tally is] 458 bodies, of which 419 bore markings they had been shot, tortured or bludgeoned to death.”

More: “Mykhailyna Skoryk-Shkarivska, the town’s deputy mayor … said the details of each case were now being investigated by prosecutors working to identify the perpetrators and ultimately try them for war crimes. The Russian troops left the corpses of many of those they killed to rot unattended, but also burned some, possibly out of hygiene concerns or to hide evidence of torture, the deputy mayor said.”