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Here’s where things stand on Tuesday 1 July 2025:

Fighting

• The Russian-installed governor of the occupied Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine, Leonid Pasechnik, said that Russian troops are now in full control of the entire region.
• If confirmed, that would make Luhansk the first Ukrainian region fully occupied by Russia after more than three years of war. Luhansk is one of four regions that Russia now claims as its own.
• Russia’s state media and war bloggers also said that Russian forces have taken control of the first village in the central Ukrainian region of Dnipropetrovsk.
• This came as Moscow-appointed officials said Ukrainian forces attacked the city of Donetsk in the Russian-occupied Donetsk region, killing at least one person, damaging several buildings and setting a market on fire.
• Also in Donetsk, Russian forces have occupied one of Ukraine’s most valuable lithium deposits near the village of Shevchenko, The Kyiv Independent reported, citing Roman Pohorilyi, the founder of the open-source mapping project Deep State Map.
• The Ukrainian Air Force, meanwhile, said it detected 107 Russian Shahed and decoy drones in the country’s airspace overnight, a day after the country experienced the biggest aerial attack from Russian forces since 2022.
• Russian strikes in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region left two civilians dead and eight wounded, including a 6-year-old child, regional Governor Oleh Syniehubov said.
• Outside the immediate region, Bloomberg reported an explosion on an oil tanker near Libya, in the latest unexplained blast on vessels that had previously called at Russian ports.

Politics and diplomacy

• Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov urged the United States to consider whether new sanctions on Russia would help the Ukraine peace effort after a top Republican senator said he had received US President Donald Trump’s blessing to move forward on a bill introducing punitive measures against Moscow.
• US envoy Keith Kellogg responded to Peskov’s comments, describing them as “Orwellian”. “Russia cannot continue to stall for time while it bombs civilian targets in Ukraine,” Kellogg said in a post on X.
• German Minister for Foreign Affairs Johann Wadephul, speaking during a visit to the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of making “pure mockery” of peace talks.
• “His apparent readiness to negotiate is only a facade so far,” Wadephul said, adding that Germany was trying to help Ukraine get to a point where it could “negotiate more strongly”.
• The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that Moscow was introducing “reciprocal measures” restricting access to 15 media outlets from the European Union, in retaliation for the latest round of EU sanctions on Russia.
• In North Korea, images on state television showed leader Kim Jong Un draping coffins with the country’s national flag in what appeared to be the repatriation of soldiers killed fighting for Russia against Ukraine, according to the Reuters news agency.
• Norway said it would deploy F-35 fighter jets to Poland to protect Polish airspace and a key logistical hub for aid to Ukraine, a day after Warsaw scrambled aircraft in response to Russian air attacks on western Ukraine, near the border.

Economy

• The International Monetary Fund said it would provide $500m to Ukraine, after completing a routine review of its $15.5bn four-year support programme.

Ukraine drone attack on central Russia kills three, wounds 35

The attack comes shortly after President Volodymyr Zelenskyy promises to increase Ukraine’s drone production.

A Ukrainian drone attack at an industrial plant in central Russia has killed three people and injured 35 others, a Russian regional governor has said.

Alexander Brechalov, head of the Udmurt Republic, said in a post on Telegram on Tuesday that the attack took place at a factory in Izhevsk city. Ten of the wounded were in a serious condition, he noted.

There  was no immediate official comment from Kyiv. But a Ukrainian security official confirmed the attack, telling the news agency Reuters that the Kupol plant had been hit, with a fire breaking out as a result.

The facility, which produces air defence systems and drones for the Russian army, is located roughly 1,300km (800 miles) from the Ukrainian border.

If confirmed, the Ukrainian mission would be one of the deepest attacks of its kind inside Russia since the start of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion.

However, it is not as far as one Kyiv claimed last May, which reportedly hit an early-warning radar in the Russian city of Orsk, some 1,800km (1,120 miles) from Ukraine.

Speaking to the AFP news agency on Tuesday, an unnamed Ukrainian security service (SBU) official hailed the most recent drone mission.

“Each such special operation reduces the enemy’s offensive potential, disrupts military production chains and demonstrates that even deep in Russia’s rear, there are no safe zones for its military infrastructure,” they said in written comments.

The attack came a day after President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine would increase its drone production, following a surge in Russian drone attacks.

Moscow  fired some 5,438 long-range drones at Ukraine in June, its highest monthly total yet, according to an analysis by AFP.

“The The priority is drones, interceptor drones and long-range strike drones,” Zelenskyy said on Telegram late on Monday about Ukraine’s manufacturing drive.

The message followed a promise last month by Ukraine’s top military commander to improve the “scale and depth” of strikes on Russia.

In other developments, the Kremlin has denied the suggestion from one of United States President Donald Trump’s special envoys that it was deliberately stalling ceasefire talks.

Keith Kellogg, Trump’s Ukraine envoy, said on Monday, “Russia cannot continue to stall for time while it bombs civilian targets in Ukraine.”

In response, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov claimed that Russia was “not interested in drawing out anything”.

A date for a third round of negotiations has yet to be agreed.

Meanwhile, a Russian-backed official in the eastern Ukrainian region of Luhansk said it is now fully under the control of Moscow. Ukraine is yet to respond to the claim.

Why is Ukraine withdrawing from the Ottawa Treaty banning landmines?

If Russia plans to broaden the ground war, Ukraine may need deeper lines of defence. Landmines could prove critical.

Ukrainian  President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has announced his country might soon quit the Ottawa Treaty banning antipersonnel landmines amid his country’s war with Russia.

“Russia has never been a party to this convention and uses antipersonnel mines with extreme cynicism,” he said on Sunday.

This  was not a mere rhetorical flourish. In August 2023, Russian soldiers booby-trapped the bodies of their fallen comrades with anti-personnel mines as they retreated to kill the Ukrainian sappers who discovered them.

Ukraine needs to even the battlefield, Zelenskyy said, because “antipersonnel mines … very often have no alternative as a tool for defence.”

What is the special role of antipersonnel landmines? Why are they banned in many countries? Why is Ukraine leaving the treaty now, and what will that allow it to do in its own defence?

What is the Ottawa Treaty?

The Ottawa Treaty of December 1997 bans the use of anti-personnel landmines, as well as the ability to “develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile, retain or transfer to anyone, directly or indirectly, anti-personnel mines”.

The treaty has been ratified by more than 160 countries and is part of the body of international law enshrined in the United Nations. As its name suggests, it aims to abolish landmines.

Major powers like China, Russia and the United States have never signed it although the US did agree to stop stockpiling antipersonnel landmines under President Barack Obama, a move reversed by his successor Donald Trump.

The rationale behind banning landmines is that they are indiscriminate killers.

“Landmines  distinguish themselves because once they have been sown, once the soldier walks away from the weapon, the landmine cannot tell the difference between a soldier or a civilian – a woman, a child,” said Jody Williams, who coordinated the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which led to the Ottawa Treaty.

“While While the use of the weapon might be militarily justifiable during the day of the battle, … once peace is declared, the landmine does not recognise that peace,” Williams said when she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997. “The war ends. The landmine goes on killing.”

They are not the first weapons to be banned. Chemical agents were banned after World War I in the Geneva Convention of 1925 because the use of chlorine gas by the Germans had led to devastatingly painful injuries.

Zelenskyy has accused Russia of violating the ban on chemical weapons use as well, a charge Moscow has rejected.

How will leaving the Ottawa Treaty help Ukraine defend itself?

The treaty prohibits the use, production and stockpiling of antipersonnel landmines. Ukraine, which ratified the treaty in 2005, has already returned to their use. In November, the US supplied Ukraine with landmines.

At the time, this was because of a drop in Russian use of mechanised armour and an increase in the use of foot soldiers.

“They don’t lead with their mechanised forces any more. They lead with dismounted forces who are able to close in and do things to kind of pave the way for mechanised forces,” then-US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said, explaining the decision.

“So that’s what the Ukrainians are seeing right now. And they have a need for things that can help slow down that effort on the part of the Russians.”

Leaving the treaty will allow Ukraine to produce and stockpile landmines. The move points towards a scaled-up and more permanent use.

The effectiveness of landmines became apparent in June 2023 when Ukraine launched a counteroffensive intended to take back swaths of Russian-occupied territory.

The counteroffensive failed largely because Russian defenders had dug themselves into trenches but also because they had planted minefields that went on for several kilometres before their positions.

Russian Major General Ivan Popov, commander of the 58th Combined Arms Army of the Southern Military District, said Russian minefields played a “very important role” in defeating the initial Ukrainian advance.

NATO’s then-Military Committee chief, Dutch Admiral Rob Bauer, confirmed that mines had been a major obstacle.

By July, Ukraine had abandoned efforts to punch mechanised columns through Russian defences and focused on wearing Russian defenders down over time.

Why is Ukraine leaving the Ottawa Treaty now?

Ukraine’s move comes amid a spate of departures from the treaty. Poland and the Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – announced in March that they would leave the treaty, saying the security situation in the region has “fundamentally deteriorated”.

Finland followed the following month to “prepare for the changes in the security environment in a more versatile way”.

All share a border with Russia or with Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave wedged between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea.

“There is a bunch of countries that are already going out from the Ottawa agreement on using these kinds of landmines. It’s normal,” said Victoria Vdovychenko, a defence expert at Cambridge University’s Centre for Geopolitics.

“It means that these countries are prioritising their national security and they are prioritising that it can be used in the context of potential warfare,” she told Al Jazeera.

Keir Giles, a Eurasia expert at the think tank Chatham House, told Al Jazeera these countries being a party to the Ottawa Treaty was a way of proving their political credentials to join Western clubs, such as NATO and the European Union.

“They had to sign up to prove membership of the club,” he said, “and so were reluctant to do anything which didn’t have them as the most forward-leading, liberal, progressive members of that club.”

“Anybody that wanted to sign up to doing what seemed right in the eyes of the global liberal elite would have done things like this whether or not it made long-term strategic sense,” Giles said, “persuaded, of course, by NATO that they wanted to focus on expeditionary operations and Russia would never be a problem again.”

The timing of the Eastern European countries’ departure is related to threat assessments shared by NATO countries.

NATO’s Bauer said in January 2024 that NATO needed to prepare for war with Russia and NATO members were living in “an era in which anything can happen at any time, an era in which we need to expect the unexpected, an era in which we need to focus on effectiveness”.

At the same time, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said a Russian attack on Germany was no longer ruled out. “Our experts expect a period of five to eight years in which this could be possible,” he said.

Since then, other eastern NATO members have said Russia poses a threat to their security.

Another element to the timing is the intensified Russian use of combined drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian cities, particularly Kharkiv, Kyiv and Odesa.

That implied that Russia may be preparing to drive the ground war towards parts of Ukraine that are currently far from the front lines, Vdovychenko said.

“We are not talking about the front lines. We are talking actually about [rear] areas and even the residential areas of Ukraine, so not so-called red line cities or communities but actually yellow cities and communities, which means slightly farther from the red line zones,” she told Al Jazeera.

In recent months, Ukraine has also faced several renewed Russian attempts to open new fronts in its northern regions of Kharkiv and Sumy.