What did 1 July 2022 show about the war's reach?
A look back at a day of civilian deaths in Odesa Oblast, death sentences in Donetsk and contested claims over Snake Island.
What did the war look like on 1 July 2022? It was a day in which violence against civilians, the treatment of captured foreign fighters and the contest over territory all came into view at once.
The starkest event was the Serhiivka missile strike in Odesa Oblast. At least 21 civilians were killed and 38 others injured when two Russian missiles hit a multi-storey building and a recreation centre. As described later, the strike came at 01:00 local time, with one missile hitting a residential building and two hitting a recreation centre in Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi Raion. Later, 2 July was declared a day of mourning in the region.
Death sentences in Donetsk
On the same date, authorities in the Donetsk People's Republic announced that they would begin carrying out capital punishment in 2025. The announcement followed a court sentencing three foreign fighters to death: two British men and a Moroccan. They had been arrested in the republic after joining the Ukrainian Army during the Russian invasion.
The Snake Island claims
The previous day, 30 June 2022, Russia announced that it had withdrawn from Snake Island in the Black Sea as a gesture of goodwill, ending an occupation that began in February. Ukraine said instead that it had driven Russian forces out after a massive artillery assault. As described later, the occupation began on 24 February 2022, the first day of the invasion, when the Russian Navy attacked and captured the island with its garrison, and it lasted 126 days.
Occupied Kherson
Two days earlier, on 29 June 2022, the Russian-appointed military-civilian authorities in Kherson announced a referendum on whether to join Russia. The same day, Kherson's de jure mayor, Ihor Kolykhaiev, was detained by Russian security forces after Russian-installed officials said he had refused to follow orders.
A wider backdrop
At the NATO summit in Madrid on 29 June 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden announced that a new permanent U.S. military base would be established in Poland, the 5th Army's Headquarters, which had had a forward command post in Poznań since the previous year. Poland's government had long requested such a base.
Taken together, these reports from 29 June to 1 July 2022 show a war fought on several fronts at once: missiles striking civilian sites far from the front line, occupation authorities moving to change the status of a captured region and detain a local official, and rival accounts of who controlled a strategic island. Allied defence posture in Europe was being reshaped at the same moment.
