LAST UPDATE | 20 Aug 2022
TWELVE UKRAINIANS, INCLUDING three children, have been wounded after Russian forces attacked an apartment block and several houses in the city of Voznesensk, near a key nuclear plant, prosecutors said.
“According to preliminary information, 12 people including three children were injured. Two children are in a serious condition,” the prosecutor’s office said on Telegram.
Regional governor Vitaly Kim had earlier said on Telegram that nine people were injured, including four children aged between three and 17, and were “all in serious condition”.
Voznesensk is located about 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the nuclear plant at Pivdennoukrainsk, Ukraine’s second largest, and 70 kilometres (40 miles) from Mykolaiv, the regional capital.
The strikes hit an apartment building and several homes in the city, which is home to 30,000 people, the emergency services said on Facebook, showing a badly damaged building.
The region, at the forefront of the war, suffers regular strikes.
“Voznesensk. The terrorist country called Russia hit a residential building,” presidential chief of staff Andriy Yermak said on Telegram.
The Ukrainian army meanwhile said they had downed four Kalibr high-precision sea-launched cruise missiles fired from the Black Sea near the central city of Dnipro.
Ivan Fedorov, the exiled mayor of Melitopol, a city in the Kherson region which has been occupied by Russia, said the Ukrainian army had bombed a Russian military base in the city.
Crimea
Meanwhile, a drone has been shot down over the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea fleet in annexed Crimea, according to a local official.
“The drone was shot down just above the fleet headquarters” in the city of Sevastopol, city governor Mikhail Razvojaev wrote on Telegram, blaming the attempt on Ukrainian forces.
“It fell on the roof and caught fire,” he said, adding that there was no major damage or victims.
It was the second attempted attack against the fleet headquarters in less than a month.
On 31 July a drone attack in the headquarters courtyard wounded five people and led to the cancellation of celebrations that had been planned for Fleet Day.
It also marked the latest attack to target Russian military infrastructure in Crimea, a Black Sea peninsula that Moscow seized and annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
On Saturday, air defence systems were activated in Evpatoria in western Crimea.
Zaporizhzhia
In Moscow, president Vladimir Putin has agreed that independent inspectors can travel to the Moscow-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, the French presidency has said, as fears grow over fighting near the site.
The apparent resolution of a dispute over whether inspectors travel via Ukraine or Russia came as a US defence official said Ukraine’s forces had brought the Russian advance to a halt.
“You are seeing a complete and total lack of progress by the Russians on the battlefield,” the official said, speaking on grounds of anonymity.
According to French President Emmanuel Macron’s office, Putin had “reconsidered” his demand that the International Atomic Energy Agency travel through Russia to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear site.
The UN nuclear watchdog’s chief, Rafael Grossi “welcomed recent statements indicating that both Ukraine and Russia supported the IAEA’s aim to send a mission to” the plant.
Meanwhile, UN chief Antonio Guterres urged Moscow’s forces occupying Zaporizhzhia not to disconnect the facility from the grid and potentially cut supplies to millions of Ukrainians.
A flare-up in fighting around the Russian-controlled nuclear power station – with both sides blaming each other for attacks – has raised the spectre of a disaster worse than in Chernobyl.
The Kremlin said that Putin and Macron agreed that the IAEA should carry out inspections “as soon as possible” to “assess the real situation on the ground”.
Putin also “stressed that the systematic shelling by the Ukrainian military of the territory of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant creates the danger of a large-scale catastrophe,” the Kremlin added.
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