What did 17 May 2022 reveal about the war?

What did the war look like on 17 May 2022, after nearly three months of full-scale invasion? The reports from that day and the preceding ones show a conflict moving on several fronts at once: battlefield shifts in the north-east, a negotiated end to part of the siege of Mariupol, continued strikes far from the front line, and a widening set of reactions abroad.

Strikes continued away from the front

On 17 May 2022, a Russian airstrike killed eight people and injured twelve others in Desna, in Chernihiv Oblast. Two days earlier, on 15 May, Russia had launched missile strikes from the Black Sea on what it called military infrastructure in Yavoriv Raion, in Lviv Oblast, close to Ukraine's western border with Poland. The regional governor, Maksym Kozytskyy, said the target had been completely destroyed.

Azovstal and Kharkiv

On 16 May, five buses and an armoured personnel carrier took several hundred soldiers out of the Azovstal steel works in Mariupol, following negotiations with the Russian Armed Forces. As reported at the time, the evacuated soldiers were to be exchanged for Russian prisoners of war.

In the Kharkiv region, Ukraine said on 16 May that a counter-offensive had pushed Russian forces back as far as the border with Russia. Kharkiv governor Oleh Synyehubov confirmed that Ukrainian forces had restored control of a border crossing there.

The Russian Defence Ministry, for its part, claimed on 16 May that its forces had shot down three Ukrainian Air Force warplanes, among them a Su-25 over Mykolaiv and a Su-24 strike jet near Snake Island in the Black Sea.

Reactions beyond the battlefield

The pressure on Russia was not only military. On 16 May, McDonald's announced that it had begun the process of selling all of its restaurants in Russia, citing the humanitarian crisis caused by the war in Ukraine as the reason for ending operations there after 32 years. It was later announced that the restaurants would reopen under a new brand in mid-June, with their menus retained.

The diplomatic temperature also rose. On 16 May, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that Russia would react to what he called an expansion of NATO military infrastructure in Sweden and Finland. He said problems were being created for no reason at all, and that Russia would react accordingly.

A day in a longer war

Taken together, the reports around 17 May 2022 show a war in which a deadly strike on a town in Chernihiv Oblast came alongside a Ukrainian advance near Kharkiv, a negotiated evacuation in Mariupol, a major Western company's exit from Russia and a sharpened Russian message to Sweden and Finland. None of these developments settled the war, and each pointed to a different arena in which it was being fought.