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Here’s where things stand on Wednesday 18 June 2025:

Fighting

• The death toll from dozens of Russian drone and missile strikes on Kyiv early on Tuesday rose to 16, according to Ukrainian authorities. Two people were also killed in attacks on the Black Sea port of Odesa, according to officials.
• North Korea will send thousands of military construction workers and deminers to support reconstruction efforts in Russia’s Kursk region, Russian news agencies reported citing the head of the Security Council, Sergei Shoigu, who made the comments as he met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang.

Diplomacy

• Canada scrapped plans for the G7 to issue a strong statement on the war after opposition from the United States, a Canadian official told reporters on the sidelines of the summit, the Reuters news agency reported.
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he told the G7 leaders that diplomacy was now “in crisis” and they needed to push US President Donald Trump to use his “real influence” to bring an end to the war. “Even if the American President is not putting enough pressure on Russia right now, the truth is that America still has the broadest global interests and the largest number of allies,” Zelenskyy said on Telegram.
• Ukraine called for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council after Russia’s deadly attack on Kyiv and other cities, Andrii Melnyk, Ukraine’s UN ambassador, was quoted telling Ukraine’s national news agency, Ukrinform.
• The Trump administration’s Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, is set to meet Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in the coming days, the Reuters news agency reported, citing four people familiar with the plans. Kellogg has in private cast the trip as a step towards reviving talks aimed at ending Russia’s war in Ukraine, according to Reuters.

Sanctions

• The United Kingdom announced sanctions on people and entities accused of being tied to Russia’s finance, energy and military operations. The sanctioned individuals include two UK residents accused of sending electronics to Moscow.
• Australia announced sanctions on 60 vessels linked to Russia’s so-called “shadow fleet” of oil tankers, following the lead of several of its Western partners, including Canada and the European Union. “Russia uses these vessels to circumvent international sanctions and sustain its illegal and immoral war against Ukraine,” Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said in a statement on Wednesday.

Ukraine’s ‘Spiderweb’ drone assault forces Russia to shelter, move aircraft

Russia’s  increased sense of vulnerability may be the most important result of a recent large-scale Ukrainian drone attack named Operation Spiderweb, experts tell Al Jazeera.

The operation destroyed as much as a third of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet on the tarmac of four airfields deep inside Russia on June 1.

Days  later, Russia started to build shelters for its bombers and relocate them.

An open source intelligence (OSINT) researcher nicknamed Def Mon posted time-lapse satellite photographs on social media showing major excavations at the Kirovskoe airfield in annexed Crimea as well as in Sevastopol, Gvardiyskoye and Saki, where Russia was constructing shelters for military aircraft.

They reported similar work at several airbases in Russia, including the Engels base, which was targeted in Ukraine’s attacks on June 1.

Another OSINT analyst, MT Anderson, used satellite images to show that all Tupolev-95 strategic bombers had left Russia’s Olenya airbase in the Murmansk region by June 7.

Much of the fleet remains intact but Ukraine “demonstrated to Russia that they do not have a sanctuary any more on their own territory”, said Minna Alander, a fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security Programme at the Center for European Policy Analysis.

“In terms of taking the war to Russian territory, it was even more important than the Kursk incursion in the sense that Ukrainians managed to hit targets of high strategic value thousands of miles from the front lines.”

Ukraine conducted a counterinvasion of Russian territory in August, catching forces in Kursk off-guard and seizing territory. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has consistently argued that the war must return to Russia. Both the Kursk offensive and Spiderweb served that purpose.

For the first time, Ukraine with its Operation Spiderweb claimed to have hit the Olenya airbase in the Russian Arctic, almost 2,000km (1,240 miles) from Ukraine, where all Tu-95 bombers were reported destroyed.

Also  reportedly struck were the Belaya airbase in Irkutsk, more than 4,000km (2,485 miles) from Ukraine; the Dyagilevo airbase in Ryazan, only 175km (110 miles) from downtown Moscow; and the Ivanovo airfield, 250km (155 miles) northeast of Moscow, where a rare early warning and targeting coordination A-50 radar aircraft was destroyed.

Russia had historically based its strategic bombers at the Engels base in Saratov and the Ukrainska base in Amur province. It dispersed them to Belaya and Olenya bases in the past two years to protect them after Ukraine struck the Engels base with drones. Now Ukraine has again deprived Russia of any sense of security.

“These strategic bomber strikes were ‘asymmetric genius’,” said Seth Krummrich, a former US army colonel and vice president of Global Guardian, a security consultancy. “Cheap drones smuggled deep into Russia destroy priceless and rare Russian strategic bombers. Ukraine is outthinking and outmanoeuvring the slow and large Russian military.”

Three days before Operation Spiderweb, Zelenskyy had said he was seeking more European investment in Ukraine’s long-range capabilities.

“Of course, we cannot publicly disclose our existing plans and our capabilities, but the prospect is clear: to respond symmetrically to all Russian threats and challenges,” Zelenskyy said. “They in Russia must clearly feel the consequences of what they are doing against Ukraine. And they will. Attack drones, interceptors, cruise missiles, Ukrainian ballistic systems – these are the key elements. We must manufacture all of them.”

Ukraine has already changed Russian threat perceptions several times during this war using long-range weapons, often targeting the Russian air force.

In 2023, Ukraine started striking Russian airfields in occupied Crimea, forcing Russia to relocate its bombers.

An unnamed White House official told Politico last year that “90 percent of the planes that launch glide bombs” against Ukrainian front-line positions have been moved back inside Russia.

Ukraine has dealt Russia similar psychological blows at sea.

In 2022, it sank the Black Sea Fleet flagship Moskva using Neptune missiles. Its subsequent development of surface drones to strike other Russian Black Sea Fleet ships has forced the Russian navy to abandon Crimea for the shelter of Novorossiysk.

In December, Ukraine adapted those surface drones to launch rockets, downing two Russian helicopters near Crimea. In early May, its Magura-7 unmanned surface drones successfully downed two Russian Sukhoi-30 fighter jets using AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles originally designed for air-to-air use. No military in the world had downed fighter jets from surface drones before.

“Russian missiles in many cases have ranges of thousands of miles. The bombers don’t need to come anywhere near Ukraine to do what they do. The Arctic was a major base for attacking Ukraine even though they’re thousands of kilometres from Ukraine,” said Keir Giles, Eurasia expert at the Chatham House think tank.

Spiderweb involved 117 drones smuggled into Russia and launched simultaneously near Russian airfields where the bombers were parked.

The drones used the Russian cellphone network but were controlled from Ukraine, Giles said.

“So they were piggybacking [on the radio network] and hiding in noise. They must have had people on site because they had an operational planning based in the country to assemble these components. … People were long gone by the time the operation happened, leaving poor, hapless Russian truck drivers trying to figure out what was going on,” he said.

On June 11, Russian President Vladimir Putin put on a brave face, saying his country possesses the most modern nuclear triad in the world, but that may have been bluster rather than a threat, experts said.

“Ukraine likely destroyed the most operational segment of the fleet, evidenced by the fact that these aircraft were not undergoing maintenance at the time of the attack,” wrote Fabian Hoffman, a missile expert. “Some were even fuelled when hit, indicating they were likely scheduled for use within the next 24 hours.”

Will such strikes win the war? “The cornerstone of this fight remains an infantryman’s bullets, artillery shells, armour, and all the vehicles and transports logistically required to support a vast front line in a defensive war,” Krummrich said. “Yes, drones significantly facilitate manoeuvre warfare in this conflict, but the drone does not win the fight.”

Ukraine’s Zelenskyy warns diplomacy in ‘crisis’ after Trump’s early G7 exit

Ukraine’s leader was denied a meeting with his most powerful ally, after Donald Trump left the summit a day early.

The Group of Seven summit in Canada has ended without leaders issuing a joint statement in support of Ukraine, as Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that “diplomacy is now in a state of crisis”.

The summit of major industrial democracies, which wrapped up in the Canadian Rocky Mountain resort of Kananaskis late on Tuesday, had been intended to showcase unity on major global issues.

 unlike in previous years, when the group had jointly denounced Russian “aggression” against Ukraine, this time it was unable to issue a statement in support of the embattled Western ally, in a sign of growing differences within the group amid escalating global crises.

Zelenskyy met the leaders of Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Japan, along with NATO chief Mark Rutte, on the final day of the conference. However, a meeting with the leader of the group’s most powerful member, the United States – President Donald Trump – did not take place after he left the summit a day early to address the escalating hostilities between Israel and Iran from Washington.

Zelenskyy said after the meeting that he had told the remaining G7 leaders that “diplomacy is now in a state of crisis”, and asked them to continue calling on Trump “to use his real influence” to press for an end to the war, according to a post on his official Telegram account.

Statement on US resistance retracted

A Canadian official initially told reporters on the sidelines of the summit that plans for a joint statement on Ukraine had been dropped after meeting resistance from the US, which wanted to water down the content, news agencies reported.

But Emily Williams, a spokesperson for Canada’s prime minister, later retracted the briefing statement and said “no proposed statement regarding Ukraine was distributed to other leaders”, agencies reported.

A Canadian official said there had never been an attempt to issue a joint statement on Ukraine because of Trump’s wishes to continue negotiating with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the AFP news agency reported.

“It was clear that it would not have been feasible to find detailed language that all G7 partners could agree to in that context,” the official said on condition of anonymity.

Trump had underlined the differences in views towards Russia within the group on Monday, when he said it had been a mistake to expel Moscow from what was formerly the G8 in response to its invasion and annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014.

Canada pledges military support

Zelenskyy had arrived at the summit calling for support from Ukraine’s allies, and declaring he was ready for peace negotiations.

“We are ready for the peace negotiations, unconditional ceasefire,” he said. “But for this, we need pressure.”

He left with a pledge from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to provide 2 billion Canadian dollars ($1.47bn) in new military assistance for Kyiv, as well as to impose new financial sanctions on Russia.

Trump did agree to a group statement before his departure, calling for a resolution of the Israel-Iran conflict. The statement, issued on Monday, backed Israel, calling Iran the principal source of regional instability and terror, and asserting that Israel has the right to defend itself.

The statement called for a “de-escalation of hostilities”, despite some bellicose social media posts from Trump hinting at greater US military involvement in the conflict.