On June 19, Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un signed a comprehensive strategic partnership agreement in Pyongyang, likely intended to use military-technical cooperation with North Korea as a threat against the West to deter further support for Ukraine.
Russia and North Korea largely framed the agreement as evidence of their mutual support as part of a common fight against the West and signaled that they share a common goal of challenging the West and the current world order.
This is stated in an analysis by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
Putin seeks to create a coalition of friendly countries with historically warm ties to the Soviet Union to act as an alternative to the West and the current world order.
On June 19, Russian government officials announced their intention to suspend Russia's participation in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE PA).
The Russian military command continues to condone a culture of leniency towards war crimes committed by subordinates on the battlefield in Ukraine.
On June 18, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin announced that his office had received confirmation that Russian forces had beheaded a Ukrainian soldier in the Volnovakhan region, Donetsk region, and displayed the severed head on top of a damaged Ukrainian car.
Kostin said that Ukrainian intelligence revealed that Russian commanders at the battalion and company level in charge of this sector of the front ordered their subordinates not to capture Ukrainian soldiers and take them as prisoners of war, as required international law, but to kill them by beheading them.
ISW cannot independently confirm which Russian commanders issued the order to behead the Ukrainian POW, but Kostin's report is consistent with a broader observed trend of numerous Russian abuses of Ukrainian POWs, apparently permitted if not expressly approved, by individual Russian commanders and supported by Russian field commanders.
On June 19, the General Directorate of Military Intelligence of Ukraine (GUR) announced that it had identified four servicemen from the Russian 70th Motorized Rifle Regiment (42nd Motorized Rifle Division, 58th Army, Southern Military District) who had executed Ukrainian prisoners of war near Robotyne, Zaporozhye region, at the end of May 2024.
The consistent commission of war crimes by various Russian formations that fall under different operational groupings of the force command suggests that individual commanders at the tactical level are enabling their subordinates to commit such theater-wide atrocities and that the Russian higher command does almost nothing to maintain discipline and order among its troops.
The Russian government is trying to deflect responsibility for Russia's well-documented violations of international law regarding Russia's treatment of Ukrainian children by accusing the Ukrainian armed forces and other security structures of committing "crimes" against children.
Air Traffic Control (ATC) communications from international airspace over the northeast Atlantic appear to indicate the first confirmed case of GPS jamming on commercial transatlantic routes.
Ukrainian forces have regained positions near Staritsa, and Russian forces have recently advanced near Chasov Yar and the city of Donetsk, and on the eastern (left) bank of Kherson Oblast.
On June 19, Finnish media outlet Yle, citing satellite images and Finnish intelligence sources, reported that the Russian military had sent about 80% of its equipment and personnel based near the Russian-Finnish border to Ukraine to to support the invasion.