A RUSSIAN STRIKE on International Red Cross vehicles in eastern Ukraine killed three of the organisation’s workers, the country’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.
Two other staff members were wounded in the attack, which happened in the village of Virolyubivka, a dozen of kilometres away from the frontline in Donetsk.
The toll was the largest among staff at the Geneva-based humanitarian organisation since a bomb blast killed three at the Aden airport in Yemen in 2020.
“Today, the occupier attacked the vehicles of the International Committee of the Red Cross humanitarian mission in Donetsk region,” Zelenskyy said.
The International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed that three of its staffers had been killed when shelling hit a site of a planned frontline aid distribution in the region. It did not say who was behind the shelling.
“I condemn attacks on Red Cross personnel in the strongest terms,” ICRC President Mirjana Spoljaric said in a statement.
“It’s unconscionable that shelling would hit an aid distribution site,” she said.
Three of our staff members in Ukraine were killed today after shelling hit the site of a planned frontline aid distribution in the Donetsk region & two more colleagues were wounded.
— ICRC (@ICRC) September 12, 2024
Our hearts are broken as we mourn this loss & care for the injured.
➡️https://t.co/uqrzseH1tA pic.twitter.com/hFHhQNhbj5
“Our hearts are broken today as we mourn the loss of our colleagues and care for the injured. This tragedy unleashes a wave of grief all too familiar to those who have lost loved ones in armed conflict.”
The ICRC said its team had been preparing to distribute wood and coal briquettes to vulnerable households to help them prepare for winter when their vehicles were hit, adding that the aid distribution “had not begun, and no residents were affected by the explosion”.
It did not provide any details about the staff members killed, but Ukrainian parliamentary commissioner for human rights Dmytro Lubinets said they were Ukrainian citizens.
There was no immediate comment from Russia, which routinely says it only hits military targets.
ICRC highlighted that its teams “are regularly present in the Donetsk region, and our vehicles are clearly marked with the Red Cross emblem”.
“The deaths of three ICRC colleagues come amid a sharp rise in the number of humanitarians killed around the world over the last two years,” it lamented.
The UN Humanitarian mission to Ukraine said 50 workers were killed or injured in Ukraine in 2023, including 11 killed in the line of duty.
“Since the beginning of the year, this repeated pattern of attacks appears to have intensified,” the UN humanitarian coordinator Denise Brown said in a statement in February.
The ICRC urgently called “for the respect of international humanitarian law, including by taking every precaution possible to ensure that those engaged in humanitarian activities are not targeted or caught in hostilities”.
It comes as Zelenskyy said Russia has launched a counter-offensive in its Kursk region to dislodge Ukraine’s forces who stormed across the border five weeks ago and put Russian territory under foreign occupation for the first time since the Second World War.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said that Moscow’s forces had recaptured ten settlements in Kursk and listed their names but did not describe the fighting as a counter-offensive.
Zelenskyy said Russia was taking “counter-offensive actions” but that Ukrainian forces had anticipated the moves and were ready to fight.
Ukraine launched its daring incursion into Kursk on 6 August, partly in the hope that Russia would divert its troops there from Donetsk in eastern Ukraine where a push by the Russian army is threatening to overrun a belt of key defensive strongholds.
The cross-border operation also raised Ukrainian morale after months of gloomy news from the front by exposing Russian vulnerabilities and seizing some initiative on the battlefield. It also sought to establish a buffer zone to prevent Russian attacks.
Moscow’s muddled response suggested Russia had not planned for such a development and was caught by surprise. Assembling forces for a counterattack, given the long distances involved and other demands along the 600-mile front line, was expected to take some time.
The Russian army has been hacking its way deeper into eastern Ukraine, especially Donetsk, and has battered Ukrainian territory with relentless missile and drone attacks.
The key eastern Ukraine city of Pokrovsk is without a drinking water supply or natural gas for cooking and heating, authorities said, as the Russian army’s push across the Donetsk region lays waste to public infrastructure and forces civilians to flee their homes.
A water filtration station in Pokrovsk was damaged in recent fighting, and more than 300 hastily drilled water wells are the city’s last source of drinking water, Donetsk regional governor Vadym Filashkin said.
The previous day, Russians destroyed a natural gas distribution station near Pokrovsk, Filashkin said.
Some 18,000 people remain in the city, including 522 children, he said. More than 20,000 people have left in the past six weeks as Russian forces creep closer to residential areas, Filashkin said.
“Evacuation is the only… choice for civilians,” he added.
Pokrovsk is one of Ukraine’s main defensive strongholds and a key logistics hub in the Donetsk region. Its capture would compromise Ukraine’s defensive abilities and supply routes and would bring Russia closer to its stated goal of capturing the entire Donetsk region, which it partially occupies.
Russian troops backed by artillery and powerful glide bombs have turned Donetsk cities and towns such as Bakhmut and Avdiivka into bombed-out shells, though the push has cost Russia heavily in troops and armour.
Ukrainian forces have held out as long as possible, even when strongholds such as Chasiv Yar appeared to be in danger of imminent collapse.
Russia has fired missiles especially at the power grid, potentially dooming Ukrainians to a bitterly cold winter this year.
The United States and Britain pledged nearly $1.5 billion (€1.3 billion) in additional aid to Ukraine on Wednesday during a visit to Kyiv by their top diplomats. Much of that will go to restoring the electricity supply.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken said: “We’re again seeing Putin dust off his winter playbook, targeting Ukrainian energy and electricity systems to weaponise the cold against the Ukrainian people.”
An overnight drone attack on Konotop, a town in Ukraine’s northern Sumy region, largely knocked out the electricity supply, regional officials said.
The blasts also blew out an “incredibly high number” of windows in the city and damaged many of the town’s tram tracks, mayor Artem Semenikhin said.
Russia launched a total of 64 Shahed drones and five missiles over eastern, central and northern regions of Ukraine, Ukraine’s air force said in its morning report.
Ukraine has expressed frustration that its western partners will not let it use sophisticated modern weapons they supply to hit places inside Russia where the missiles and drones are launched from. Some western leaders fear that would trigger an escalation of the war.
But after Iran recently supplied ballistic missiles to Russia, according to the US, those rules of engagement could be set to change in coming days as heavier Russian bombardments could swamp Ukraine’s meagre air defences.
Pentagon spokesman Lt Col Charlie Dietz said that US long-range guided missiles would not be able to reach all the locations from where Russia launches some of its assets.
In other developments, Ukrainian Military Intelligence claimed to have shot down a Russian Su-30SM jet over the Black Sea.
A post on the agency’s social media said the warplane was hit with a portable surface-to-air missile.
Also, Zelenkskyy posted photos of a ship loaded with grain that he said was struck by a Russian missile on Thursday shortly after leaving Ukrainian territorial waters.
The merchant ship was taking wheat to Egypt, Zelenskyy wrote on his Telegram page, adding that nobody was injured in the strike.
With reporting from Press Association and © AFP 2024
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