RUSSIAN STRIKES BATTERED the central Ukraine city of Zaporizhzhia today, authorities said, in fatal attacks that tore through high-rise buildings and left a toddler injured.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba slammed the strikes, saying that “Russians keep deliberately striking civilians to sow fear”.
“Russian terror must be stopped – by force of weapons, sanctions and full isolation,” he said on social media.
The Ukrainian-controlled city is located in the eponymous Zaporizhzhia region, also home to the Russian-occupied nuclear plant that has been the site of heavy shelling.
Moscow claimed to have annexed the region last week even though its forces do not control all of it.
The region’s Ukraine-appointed governor initially said two people had died after seven bombardments but the local emergency service reported that at least three people had been killed.
“The employees of the emergency service removed three bodies from beneath the destroyed structures of the building,” it said on social media, adding that the rescue operation continues.
AFP journalists on the scene saw rescue workers in hard helmets clearing rubble with their hands, searching for people trapped beneath the debris.
Firefighters were working to extinguish a blaze from a collapsed section of a building with pieces of jagged metal protruding.
“Seven people were injured with varying degrees of severity. They are being treated, including one three-year-old child”, governor Oleksandr Starukh said on social media.
Shortly after, he said there was a second bout of incoming fire but gave no details.
Last week Ukraine said at least 30 people were killed after a convoy of civilian cars in the Zaporizhzhia region was shelled in an attack Kyiv blamed on Moscow.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday finalised the annexation of four Ukrainian territories – Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – but the Kremlin is yet to confirm what areas of those regions are being annexed.
Ukraine’s presidency said today that over the past day 14 people were killed in attacks in the Donetsk region.
The UN nuclear agency chief was due in Kyiv today to discuss creating a security zone around Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia atomic plant – the largest in Europe – after Putin ordered his government to take it over.
Recaptured territory
Ukraine said that it had wrested Russian troops out from swathes of the southern Kherson region, pushing a counter-offensive that has undermined the Kremlin’s claim to have annexed the territories.
The country’s military has not only said it was re-claiming territory in the south, but also in the eastern Lugansk and Donetsk regions, that have been partially controlled by Kremlin proxy forces since 2014.
“The Armed Forces of Ukraine have liberated more than 400 square kilometres of the Kherson region since the beginning of October,” Ukrainian southern army command spokeswoman Natalia Gumeniuk said in a briefing online.
She later added that the recaptured territory was home to nearly 30 towns and villages that had been occupied by Russian forces for months.
Kherson, a region with an estimated pre-war population of around one million people, was captured early and easily by Moscow’s troops after their invasion launched 24 February.
Russian-installed officials have renewed a call for residents to remain calm, with deputy pro-Moscow leader Kirill Stremousov saying Kremlin forces were holding back the advance.
‘No panic’
“At this stage, nothing has changed and there is no panic,” he said in a video-statement to residents.
Ukrainian forces have in particular made gains on the west bank of the river Dnieper that cuts through Kherson, but the Russian military in a briefing said today that its forces rebuffed “repeated attempts to break through our defences” in the area.
Further west, on Ukraine’s contact line with Russian forces from the Mykolaiv region – where Kyiv’s forces had been hunched in fox holes for months and pounded by Russian artillery – the mood was shifting along with frontlines.
Bogdan, 29, from northwest Ukraine re-enlisted in the military this year and has spent most of the summer holding the line some four kilometres from the dug-in positions of Moscow’s forces.
“We see that our comrades, our ‘horde’ as we call them, are working. We see their successes and it inspires us. If some thought before that we weren’t moving fast enough, well now that’s not the case!” he said.
“There is light at the end of the tunnel,” said commander Yaroslav, a sturdy 39-year-old man wearing a black cap.
The Ukrainian push deeper into Kherson is putting further strain on the Kremlin’s announcement last week that it had annexed the territory – alongside three others – and that its residents were would Russian “forever”.
The four territories – Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia – create a land corridor between Russia and the Crimean peninsula, which was annexed by Moscow in 2014.
Together, the five regions make up around 20% of Ukraine.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say