LAST UPDATE | 23 Jul 2023
UNESCO HAS CONDEMNED Russia’s “brazen” attack on the Ukrainian city of Odesa, which hit several sites in the port city’s World Heritage centre.
“UNESCO is deeply dismayed and condemns in the strongest terms the brazen attack carried out by the Russian forces, which hit several cultural sites in the city centre of Odesa, home to the World Heritage property ‘The Historic Centre of Odesa’”, the Paris-based body said in a statement.
The strike, Russia’s latest attack on the Black Sea city and one of Ukraine’s most important ports following Moscow’s pulling out of a grain deal that allowed Kyiv to export its grain, killed at least two people.
UNESCO chief Audrey Azoulay said it marked “an escalation of violence against (the) cultural heritage of Ukraine”.
The strike notably damaged the Transfiguration Cathedral, originally built in 1794 under imperial Russian rule, demolished under Soviet leader Stalin in 1936 and rebuilt in the 1990s following the Soviet Union collapse.
“The destruction is enormous, half of the cathedral is now roofless,” said Archdeacon Andrii Palchuk, as cathedral workers brought documents and valuable items out of the severely building, the floor of which was inundated with water used by firefighters to extinguish the fire.
Palchuk said the damage was caused by a direct hit from a Russian missile that penetrated the building down to the basement and caused significant damage.
Two people who were inside at the time of the strike were wounded.
The strikes came just hours before Russian President Vladimir Putin met his Belarus counterpart for talks.
Putin claimed Kyiv’s counteroffensive had “failed” as he met his closest ally, Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko, in Saint Petersburg – the first time since Minsk helped end a revolt by Russian Wagner fighters.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy vowed retaliation for the strikes on Odesa: “They will definitely feel this,” he said.
Images showed smashed mosaics on the cathedral floor as workers cleared the rubble. The outside of the building appeared intact.
“There was a direct hit to the cathedral, it completely damaged three altars,” Father Myroslav, the assistant rector of the cathedral said.
He said icons were pulled out from under the rubble and that the shrine is “very badly damaged inside”, with “only the bell tower intact.”
Clergymen said a security guard and a priest readying for a morning liturgy were inside during the attack but both survived.
Russia blamed the cathedral damage on Ukrainian air defence.
Moscow said it had hit all its intended targets in the Odesa strike, claiming the sites were being used to prepare “terrorist acts” against Russia.
But on the ground, locals said Russia had hit ordinary residential areas.
“We have ordinary residential buildings here, where people live,” a woman who owns a beauty salon nearby, Tetiana, told AFP.
“There are no military facilities here. Just simple beauty salons, a marine agency, a groomer. Nothing military here at all.”
Anzhelika Domanska said she ran with her neighbours when she saw the cathedral burning.
The strike came a year after a missile had hit her house in nearby Mykolaiv.
“It is not a pleasant anniversary,” she said.
Russia launched a wave of attacks on the Black Sea port this week, after exiting a deal allowing the safe passage of cargo ships between Moscow, Kyiv, Istanbul and the UN.
Ukraine has vowed to find a way to continue exports from the ports and said Sunday repeated Russian strikes on Odesa this week were an attempt to “prevent and neutralise international efforts to restore the functioning of the “grain corridor.”
As Odesa cleared rubble from the Russian strikes, Putin hosted his ally Lukashenko in his native city of Saint Petersburg, claiming that the Ukrainian counteroffensive to take back land captured by Russia had failed.
“There is no counteroffensive,” Lukashenko said at the meeting, before being interrupted by Putin:
“There is one, but it has failed.”
The Belarus strongman now hosts Wagner fighters on his territory, after brokering a deal that convinced its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin to end a march on Moscow and exile himself to Belarus.
“They are asking to go West, ask me for permission… to go on a trip to Warsaw, to Rzeszow,” Lukashenko said, referring to Wagner fighters, to Putin, who smiled. “But of course, I am keeping them in central Belarus, like we agreed”.
“We are controlling what is happening (with Wagner),” he said, thanking Putin for vowing to defend Belarus should it be attacked.
The comments came two days after Putin said western Poland was a “gift” from Stalin at the end of World War II, when victorious allies decided on the contours of post-war Europe. Warsaw had summoned the Russian ambassador over the remarks.
After their talks, Putin and Lukashenko greeted crowds in the naval town and base of Kronstadt on Kotlin Island in a rare walkabout.
Russia’s Kommersant newspaper posted a video of Putin and Lukashenko posing for photographs with people, with bodyguards standing nearby.
Asked about quarantine rules which the Russian leader has been keeping up strictly since the pandemic, Putin replied: “People are more important than quarantine.”
Several days after Wagner had ended its mutiny last month, Putin met with adoring crowds in Dagestan in an apparent show of popularity.
With reporting from PA
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