LAST UPDATE | 23 Jul 2022

UKRAINE HAS SAID that Russian missiles struck the Odessa port, a key Black Sea terminal, one day after Moscow and Kyiv penned a deal to resume grain exports blocked by the war.

“The enemy attacked the Odessa sea port with Kalibr cruise missiles. Two of the missiles were shot down by air defences. Two hit port infrastructure,” Sergiy Bratchuk, a representative of the Odessa region said in a statement on social media.

Yesterday Russia and Ukraine signed a landmark deal aimed at unblocking Ukrainian Black Sea grain exports and alleviating a global food crisis. 

Ukraine Foreign ministry spokesman Oleg Nikolenko said the strike is Vladimir Putin’s “spit in the face” of the UN Secretary General and the Turkish President “who made enormous efforts to reach the agreement”. 

“If the reached agreement is not fulfilled, Russia will bear full responsibility for deepening the global food crisis,” Nikolenko added.

A regional governor said this morning that Russian missile strikes on railway infrastructure and a military airfield in central Ukraine have left at least three people dead, including a Ukrainian serviceman.

“Nine Ukrainian servicemen were injured and one serviceman is dead. First, two guards of an electrical substation were killed,” Andriy Raikovych, the head of the Kirovograd region told Ukrainian media.

Russian strikes on central Ukraine are picking up after a lull that came while fighting focused on the eastern Donbas region, which is now mostly under Moscow’s control.

The announced impacts from today’s strikes was an unusual admission of precise military casualties from Ukraine, in a conflict in which military deaths have been closely guarded by both sides.

Raikovych said earlier in a statement on social media that a barrage of 13 sea-launched Russian cruise missiles had struck outside the administrative centre of his Kirovograd region.

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“Infrastructural facilities outside the regional centre were targeted, in particular, the military airfield Kanatove and a facility linked to Ukrainian Railways,” Raikovych said.

The city, Kropyvnytskyi, has an estimated population of 220,000 people and lies some 300 kilometres south of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv.

© AFP 2022