Ukraine and Russia: What you need to know right now

(Reuters) – Rescue workers pulled more bodies and some survivors from an apartment building destroyed by a missile strike that killed 24 people in eastern Ukraine, while a Russian bombardment killed at least three in the second largest city Kharkiv. nL4N2YS0DR]

FIGHTING

* Russia’s defence ministry said on Monday its missiles had struck ammunition depots in Ukraine’s central Dnipro region used to supply rocket launchers and artillery weapons. Russian forces also struck two Ukrainian army hangars storing U.S.-manufactured artillery pieces near Kostantinovka in eastern Donetsk province, it said.

* Ukraine’s general staff said Russia had launched a wave of bombardments as they seek to seize Donetsk, the other province in the eastern industrial Donbas region, after taking Luhansk to the north. It said the widespread shelling amounted to preparations for an intensification of hostilities.

* Reuters could not independently verify battlefield accounts.

ECONOMY/DIPLOMACY

* The biggest single pipeline carrying Russian gas to Germany began annual maintenance on Monday, with flows expected to stop for 10 days, but governments, markets and companies are worried the shutdown might be extended because of the war in Ukraine.

* Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan told Russia’s Vladimir Putin that it was time to act on a United Nations plan to set up a sea corridor for Ukrainian grain exports through the Black Sea, state-owned Anadolu news agency reported. Food prices have soared globally as conflict in Ukraine, the world’s largest grain supplier, has fuelled fears for food security.

* Lithuania expanded curbs on trade through its territory to Kaliningrad, as phase-ins on earlier-announced European Union sanctions against Moscow took effect.

* Putin and his Belarus counterpart Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally, discussed a possible response to Lithuania’s actions during a phone call, their Telegram accounts said.

* The French government is preparing for a total cut-off of Russian gas supplies, which it regards as the most likely scenario in its forward planning.

POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS

* The lower house of the Russian parliament will gather on July 15 for an extraordinary session, its council decided, just days after President Vladimir Putin warned that he had not had not even started to get serious in the war in Ukraine.

QUOTE

* “I was thrown into the bathroom, it was all chaos, I was in shock, all covered in blood. By the time I left the bathroom, the room was full up of rubble, three floors fell down. I never found the kittens.” -Venera, a survivor of the Russian rocket strike in Chasiv Yar.

(Compiled by Stephen Coates and Mark Heinrich)