Liveblog: ++ Russia suggests splitting up Ukraine with the EU ++

Russia has discussed the partition of Ukraine with the EU. Meanwhile, Moscow is again threatening to end the grain agreement with Kiev. All developments in the live blog.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz has promised to resume personal contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “It’s been some time since my last phone call. But I intend to speak to Putin again in due course,” Scholz told the “Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger”.

A prerequisite for a “fair peace” is the withdrawal of Russian troops. When asked whether this also includes withdrawing from the Crimean peninsula, which has been occupied by Russia since 2014, Scholz said it was “not our business to formulate what agreements she wants to make instead of Ukraine”. However, Russia must understand that it cannot be a kind of “cold peace” with the existing front line as the new border between Russia and Ukraine.

According to Ukrainian sources, the capital Kiev was again subjected to massive Russian airstrikes during the night. “Another air raid on Kiev, the 13th in a row since the beginning of May! And as always at night,” the city’s civil and military administration said on Telegram, according to the AFP news agency. So far, the authorities have not given any information on casualties or damage.

Attacks were also reported from other parts of the country. There were impacts in the Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions. According to the Ukrainian Air Force, Russia fired 17 missiles of different types and 31 so-called kamikaze drones of the Iranian type “Shahed-136/131” at Ukraine. 10 cruise missiles and 23 “Shahed” drones and 2 reconnaissance drones were shot down, it said. According to the Ukrainian General Staff, a missile hit a dam in the Karlivka Oblast of Donetsk Region in eastern Ukraine. As a result, there is “great danger from flooding” for the surrounding towns.

Japan has sharply criticized the stationing of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus and wants to impose additional sanctions on Russia. Japanese Cabinet Chairman Hirokazu Matsuno said the deployment of the weapons would further aggravate the situation surrounding the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “As the only country to have suffered nuclear bombings during the war, Japan never accepts Russia’s nuclear threat, let alone its use,” Matsuno said at a news conference.

According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, 106 Ukrainian soldiers were brought back to Ukraine as part of a prisoner exchange. The soldiers had previously fought in Bachmut and were considered missing. “But we found them. We brought them back home. Eight officers, 98 soldiers and non-commissioned officers,” Zelenskyy said in a video speech on Twitter.

Russia is threatening not to extend the existing grain agreement on safe wartime exports from three Ukrainian Black Sea ports beyond July 17. For the agreement to continue, certain requirements would first have to be met, as the Russian Foreign Ministry explained.

Specifically, this involves the reopening of a pipeline that transports Russian ammonia to the Ukrainian Black Sea port of Pivdennyi and the reconnection of the Russian agricultural bank Rosselkhozbank to the international payment network SWIFT.

According to its own statements, Russia would only be ready for a lasting peace in Ukraine once it had annexed most of the attacked neighboring country. The deputy chief of the Russian Security Council, ex-President Dmitry Medvedev, outlined three possible scenarios for the outcome of the war on Thursday.

In his preferred variant, western regions of Ukraine would be ceded to several EU countries and eastern regions to Russia, while residents of the central areas voted to join Russia. With this outcome, “the conflict will end with sufficient guarantees that it will not resume in the long term,” Medvedev wrote in the online service Telegram.

If, on the other hand, part of Ukraine were to join the EU or NATO, hostilities would flare up again, “with the risk that it could quickly turn into a full-fledged third world war,” said a confidant of Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin.

Ukraine has so far refused any cession of the areas occupied by force by Moscow and is planning a counter-offensive instead.