LAST UPDATE | 25 Apr 2022
AT LEAST FIVE people are killed and 18 injured in Russian rocket strikes on railway stations in the central Ukraine region of Vinnytsia, the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office says.
The head of Ukraine railways says five stations in the centre and west of the country came under fire in the space of an hour.
There have been several attacks against Ukrainian rail and fuel facilities, with critical infrastructure being hit far from the Russian front line in the Donbas.
Two fires were also reported at oil facilities in western Russia, not far from the Ukrainian border. It was not clear what caused the blazes.
Russia HAS focused its firepower to the west, with missiles and war planes striking far behind the front lines, in an apparent bid to slow the movement of Ukrainian supplies towards the east and disrupt the flow of fuel needed by the country’s forces.
Oleksandr Kamyshin, the head of the state-run Ukrainian Railways, said five railway facilities in central and western Ukraine were hit today, including a missile attack near the western city of Lviv.
Russia also destroyed an oil refinery in Kremenchuk in central Ukraine, along with fuel depots there, said Russian Defence Ministry spokesman Maj Gen Igor Konashenkov. In all, Russian warplanes destroyed 56 Ukrainian targets overnight, he said.
Further south, in Mariupol, Russia announced a ceasefire earlier today around the Azovstal steel plant to allow a civilian evacuation from the industrial area.
However, it claimed no one had used the corridor and that Ukraine had “undermined” it.
The Azovstal plant has been sheltering the remaining Ukrainian resistance in the port city, as well as an unknown number of civilians, and has recently been under attack by Russian forces.
Russia’s defence ministry said civilians would be taken “in any direction they have chosen”, adding that the Ukrainian side should show “readiness” to start the humanitarian evacuations “by raising white flags” at Azovstal.
Russia last week said it had gained full control of the strategic eastern Ukrainian city, except for its huge Azovstal industrial area.
President Vladimir Putin ordered a blockade of the steelworks, where hundreds of civilians are reportedly sheltering with Ukrainian troops.
In a visit to Kyiv to meet President Volodymyr Zelensky yesterday, the American secretaries of state and defence said Washington had approved a $165 million sale of ammunition – non-US ammo, mainly if not entirely to fit Ukraine’s Soviet-era weapons – along with more than $300 million in financing to buy more supplies.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken said after the meeting that the West’s united support for Ukraine and pressure on Moscow are having “real results”.
“When it comes to Russia’s war aims, Russia is failing. Ukraine is succeeding,” he added.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba welcomed the American support but said that “as long as Russian soldiers put a foot on Ukrainian soil, nothing is enough”.
Kuleba warned that if western powers want Ukraine to win the war and “stop Putin in Ukraine and not to allow him to go further, deeper into Europe”, then countries need to speed up the delivery of the weapons requested by Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the EU’s judicial cooperation agency has said that the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor will join an EU investigations team to probe possible international crimes committed in Ukraine.
Chief prosecutor Karim Khan has signed an agreement with prosecutors general of Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine to take part in a joint investigative team to look into possible war crimes and crimes against humanity committed since Russia’s invasion.
The agreement “aims to facilitate investigations and prosecutions in the concerned states as well as those that could be taken forward before the ICC”, Eurojust said.
“With this agreement, the JIT parties and the Office of the Prosecutor are sending a clear message that all efforts will be undertaken to effectively gather evidence on core international crimes committed in Ukraine and bring those responsible to justice,” the Hague-based agency said.
Khan visited the town of Bucha almost two weeks ago – the scene of hundreds of civilian killings which Ukraine has blamed on Russian forces who occupied it for several weeks.
“Ukraine is a crime scene. We’re here because we have reasonable grounds to believe that crimes within the jurisdiction of the court are being committed,” Khan told reporters at the time.
Russia has denied responsibility for the deaths and President Vladimir Putin has dismissed reports of Russian soldiers shooting civilians as “fake”.
With additional reporting by Press Association
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