A lull at the front, mass kamikaze drone strikes in Ukraine, convicts desert Russian MoD units. What happened on the front line on May 29?

The news group of Russian government TV channel Perviy Kanal (“Channel One”) on social network VK tried to ban comments mentioning Shebekino, which regularly comes under fire, causing a Streisand effect. Regional social media groups responded by writing the name of the settlement with deliberate mistakes in the comments, or using the Latin alphabet. Comments about Shebekino began to multiply in the TV channel’s main group as well.

Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor of the Belgorod region, suggested “annexing Kharkiv to the Belgorod region” as a radical solution to the shelling. He also said that Ukrainian “sabotage groups” had infiltrated the region at least six times since the beginning of the war.

Vladimir Kulishov, head of the FSB Border Guard Service, reported that over 2,000 attacks on military, border, transport and energy infrastructure facilities in the Russian border area, including the use of drones, had been recorded from the territory of Ukraine since February 2022.

Losses

The BBC's Russian Service, together with independent outlet Mediazona, updated its count of Russian casualties in the war against Ukraine based on 24,005 obituaries available in open sources. One third of the dead were listed as volunteers, mobilized soldiers, prisoners and new recruits in private military companies (PMCs), indicating they were not related to Russia’s army prior to February 24, 2022. The media outlets noted that the actual number of deaths is much higher than the stated figure of confirmed deaths.

Media outlets linked to the Wagner PMC, such as the Telegram channel Grey Zone, published their own data on the losses inflicted on Ukraine. The channel alleged that between March 2022 and May 2023, the Wagner Group killed 72,095 Ukrainian soldiers, captured 509 people, destroyed more than 2,000 motor vehicles and over 1,000 armored vehicles.

The apparent mass desertion of convicts recruited to a Russian Ministry of Defense unit, previously reported by “war correspondent” Roman Romanov, has been confirmed. The regional media outlet 161.ru wrote that an orientation note was sent out in the Rostov region listing 39 former convicts who had run away from the “Storm Z” detachment along with their weapons. According to the publication, they killed a military officer from the so-called “LPR” security ministry during their escape.

Russian state-run news agency TASS then reported the escape of seven more former prisoners from a military unit near occupied Soledar in the Donetsk region. According to a source in law enforcement, five of them were detained, the sixth was killed by his fellow soldiers for wanting to surrender, and there has been no information on the whereabouts of the seventh deserter.

The controversy over the fate of the Yuriy Ivanov class (Project 18280) medium reconnaissance ship Ivan Khurs after the attack by several naval drones appears to have come to an end. The Russian Defense Ministry posted a video of the ship's arrival and ceremonial welcome in Sevastopol, with no visible damage on the hull or elsewhere.