Russia and Ukraine traded lethal strikes across their shared border overnight into 12 July, killing at least nine people in one of the near-daily exchanges that have defined the war's summer phase. Russian drones and ballistic missiles killed four people in Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk region, including two in a strike on an industrial enterprise in Kryvyi Rih, and one in Kherson, according to Arab News. Ukrainian long-range drone strikes killed four people in Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia and one more in Russia's Samara region, deep inside Russian territory.

The overnight toll follows a heavier barrage two nights earlier, on 10-11 July, when Russia fired six Iskander-M or S-400 ballistic missiles, six cruise missiles and 121 drones at Kyiv, Sumy, Odesa, Kharkiv and Sloviansk, killing at least eight people and wounding dozens, Al Jazeera reported. Ukrainian air defences shot down 111 of the drones and two of the cruise missiles, but all six ballistic missiles evaded interception — a gap Ukrainian officials have repeatedly flagged as the war's most dangerous capability shortfall. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said civilian infrastructure in Kyiv was hit "even before the air raid alert was issued," per the same report.

A stalled diplomacy track

The strikes land against a diplomatic backdrop that has gone quiet. Arab News notes that US-led efforts to broker an end to the fighting have stalled in recent months as Washington's attention shifted toward the conflict with Iran. The next scheduled diplomatic contact is a round of talks in Paris on 13 July. Ukraine has separately secured a political agreement with Washington on licensing Patriot air defence production inside Ukraine, reached at the NATO summit in Ankara — a process Zelenskyy has said will take months to yield hardware, leaving the ballistic-missile gap exposed in the interim.

The sanctions bill's architect dies at the moment it moves

The overnight exchange coincided with a jolt in Washington. Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who spent more than a year pushing a bill to sanction countries that buy Russian oil, died on the night of 11 July at age 71 after what his office described as a brief and sudden illness, according to CBS News. His death came less than 24 hours after he announced, alongside Democratic senators Richard Blumenthal and Jeanne Shaheen and Republican Roger Wicker, that the Trump administration had agreed to back a revised version of the bill, the Washington Times reported. Graham had called the agreement proof the bill was "going to become law."

The legislation, first introduced in January 2026 with more than 80 bipartisan co-sponsors, would let the president impose tariffs of up to 500 percent on countries that continue buying Russian oil, gas and uranium — a mechanism aimed squarely at China and India, the two largest purchasers of discounted Russian crude. Ukraine's sanctions policy commissioner, Vladyslav Vlasiuk, told RFE/RL that Russia earned roughly $58 billion from oil exports to China and India in the first half of the year alone, revenue he said is "financing Russia's war against Ukraine, paying for missiles, drones, and continued aggression."

Graham's last foreign trip was to Kyiv on 10 July, where he met Zelenskyy to discuss the bill and drone-production cooperation, calling it a "huge mistake" for the US to sit out that partnership, per Euromaidan Press. Zelenskyy wrote afterward that "the stronger Ukraine is on the battlefield, the greater the chances that diplomacy will ultimately succeed," and said Graham had briefed him on the bill's progress in Congress.

Why it matters: Nine deaths in one night is not, by itself, unusual for this war — it is the third such cross-border barrage in under two weeks. What makes this moment notable is the collision of two escalation tracks: battlefield strikes reaching deeper into both Russian and Ukrainian territory, and a sanctions bill built to choke Russian oil revenue losing its chief legislative sponsor at the exact hour it cleared its central obstacle. The bill's substance — tariffs on China and India as Russia's largest oil customers — makes it a rare tool that could pressure Moscow's war financing without a single additional weapon shipment. Whether it retains momentum without Graham now becomes a live question for Kyiv.

What is fact, what is open

Established: the casualty figures and locations from both nights of strikes, the Senate-White House agreement announced 11 July, and Graham's death that same night are all confirmed by multiple named sources above. Open question, not yet answered by available reporting: who among the bill's remaining co-sponsors — Blumenthal, Shaheen or Wicker are the most likely candidates given their roles in the 11 July announcement — will now steer it through a floor vote, and whether the White House's commitment survives a change in Senate leadership on the file. Also unconfirmed: any causal link between the diplomatic stall noted by Arab News and the intensity of this week's strikes; the two are documented in parallel by sources, not tied together by any official statement.

What to watch

  • Whether Blumenthal, Shaheen or Wicker moves to bring the revised sanctions bill to a Senate floor vote in the coming weeks
  • Whether the Paris talks scheduled for 13 July produce any change in the diplomatic track described as stalled
  • Whether Ukraine's Patriot production licence, agreed in principle at the NATO Ankara summit, begins converting into deployed interceptors capable of stopping the ballistic missiles that keep breaching air defences
  • Further Ukrainian strikes reaching into Russian regions like Samara, which would confirm a pattern of deeper cross-border reach rather than a one-off