LAST UPDATE | 28 Jul 2022
RUSSIAN STRIKES ON the central Ukrainian region of Kyrovograd have left five people dead and wounded more than two dozen others, the region’s governor said today.
“Twenty-five people have been transferred to medical facilities and are receiving treatment. Five are dead,” governor Andriy Raikovich said in a video on his social media.
He added that the strikes had hit two hangars at around 12:20 local time (09:20 GMT).
The Interfax-Ukraine news agency quoted Raikovich as saying that there were 12 servicemen among the wounded.
Citing city officials, Interfax-Ukraine reported that the attack on the city of Kropyvnytskyi damaged “aviation equipment”, aircraft and nearby buildings.
Railway infrastructure and a military airfield were targeted by Russian strikes in Kropyvnytskyi over the weekend, leaving three dead, including a soldier, and injuring nine servicemen, authorities said over the weekend.
The city, Kropyvnytskyi, has an estimated population of 220,000 people and lies some 300 kilometres (186 miles) south of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv.
Russian troops withdrew from the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions months ago, failing to capture either.
The renewed strikes on the areas come a day after the leader of pro-Kremlin separatists in the east, Denis Pushilin, publicly called on the Russian forces to “liberate Russian cities founded by the Russian people – Kyiv, Chernihiv, Poltava, Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Lutsk”.
Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, also came under a barrage of shelling overnight.
The southern city of Mykolaiv was fired at as well, with one person sustaining injuries.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military continued to counterattack in the occupied southern region of Kherson, striking a key bridge over the Dnieper River on Wednesday.
Ukrainian media has quoted Ukraine’s presidential adviser, Oleksiy Arestovich, as saying that the operation to liberate Kherson “has already begun”.
Arestovich said Kyiv’s forces were planning to isolate Russian troops there and leave them with three options – to “retreat, if possible, surrender or be destroyed”.
Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, in televised remarks on Wednesday said he was “cautious” in assessing the timeline of the possible counter-offensive.
“I would really like it to be much faster,” he said, adding that “the enemy is now concentrating the maximum number (of forces) precisely in the Kherson direction”.
“A very large-scale movement of their troops has begun, they are gathering additional forces,” Danilov warned.
The British military estimated today that Ukraine’s counteroffensive in Kherson is “gathering momentum”.
“Their forces have highly likely established a bridgehead south of the Ingulets River, which forms the northern boundary of Russian-occupied Kherson,” the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) said.
It added that Ukraine has used its new long-range artillery to damage at least three of the bridges across the Dnieper River, “which Russia relies upon to supply the areas under its control”.
The 1,000-metre-long Antonivsky Bridge, which Ukrainian forces struck on Wednesday, is likely to be “unusable”, the MoD concluded.
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