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Russian forces continue to make marginal territorial gains east of Novopavlivka as Russian forces attempt to advance into Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and toward the settlement from three tactical directions. Geolocated footage published on June 13 indicates that Russian forces recently advanced in central Horikhove (east of Novopavlivka) and likely seized the settlement.
Russian officials largely condemned the June 13 Israeli strikes against Iran, as Russian President Vladimir Putin continued to offer to facilitate negotiations on Iran's nuclear program.
The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces have sustained over one million casualties since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, over half of which occurred since January 2024.[
Occupied Crimea is poised to face a severe water crisis in the coming months, a crisis that the Russian occupation of Crimea has precipitated and which ongoing Russian mismanagement and resource misallocation will exacerbate.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stated on June 10 that the United States intends to reduce its budget for the purchase of weapons for Ukraine in 2026.
Ukrainian officials warned that the People's Republic of China (PRC) is increasingly enabling Russia to improve and grow its drone production. Ukraine's Foreign Intelligence Service (SZRU) Spokesperson Oleh Aleksandrov told Politico in an interview published on June 5 that Chinese manufacturers are providing Russian developers with hardware, electronics, navigation, optical, and telemetry systems, engines, microcircuits, processor modules, antenna field systems, and control boards.
Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be switching between rhetoric focused on Russian ethnic nationalism and Russian multinationalism, but remains committed to promoting anti-Western sentiment and the militarization of Russia's youth. Putin held a meeting with the Security Council on June 10 that largely focused on the unification of the peoples of Russia and the use of military-patriotic youth programs and Russian government initiatives to promote Russian patriotism.
Russian forces recently advanced to the Dnipropetrovsk-Donetsk administrative border as Kremlin officials continued to demonstrate that Russia has wider territorial ambitions in Ukraine beyond Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson oblasts and Crimea.
Kremlin-appointed Russian Commissioner on Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova tacitly acknowledged that Russia has illegally deported Ukrainian children. Lvova-Belova claimed on June 4 that Russian Presidential Aide Vladimir Medinsky gave her “the list” and that her office has “started working on it,” in reference to the list of hundreds of kidnapped Ukrainian children which Ukrainian officials handed over to Russian officials during negotiations in Istanbul on June 2.
The Sino-Russian relationship is closer and more interconnected in 2025 than it has ever been. The cooperation between Beijing and Moscow is a nexus—their relationship is a flexible and strategic knot of interconnections across the military, technological, economic, and political domains, and is not bounded by the structural rigidity of a formal defensive alliance. This Sino-Russian nexus has solidified against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine. Moscow and Beijing have both exploited the circumstances of the war to deepen their strategic entanglement, and it has therefore become strategically impossible to separate them at this time.