What the early July 2023 strikes showed Ukraine

What did the first days of July 2023 reveal about the security picture in Ukraine? By 5 July 2023, reports from the preceding two days pointed to a pattern of attacks on cities far from one another, and to a political response focused on air defence.

Strikes across several regions

On 3 July, Russia launched drone attacks on Sumy, killing two people and injuring 19 others. In response, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for a major upgrade of anti-aircraft defences.

The following day, 4 July, Ukrainian officials said Russian forces attacked Pervomaiskyi in Kharkiv Oblast with missiles, injuring at least 38 civilians and damaging infrastructure. Two people were killed in Russian shelling of Kherson, and three more were injured by shelling in Chernihiv.

Taken together, these reports covered four separate places over two days, and each involved civilian casualties. The weapons differed: drones in Sumy, missiles in Pervomaiskyi and shelling in Kherson and Chernihiv. The president's call for better anti-aircraft defences followed the Sumy drone attack.

A sanctions track alongside the strikes

On 3 July, a separate development unfolded away from the battlefield. Ukraine's National Agency on Corruption Prevention added the British conglomerate Unilever to its list of "international sponsors of war". The agency claimed that Unilever's Russian operations indirectly fund the invasion. That was the agency's claim, and the listing did not itself amount to a sanction imposed by another state.

The two threads were distinct, but they showed Kyiv pressing on two fronts at once: demanding stronger protection against attacks on its towns and cities, and pressing foreign companies over their links to Russia.

Why it mattered

The casualty figures from Sumy and Pervomaiskyi, and the deaths in Kherson, give a concrete sense of the exposure of Ukrainian communities in early July 2023. The call for an air-defence upgrade was a direct reaction to that exposure.