LAST UPDATE | 12 May
RUSSIAN FORCES HAVE taken four more villages in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region while across the border in the Russian town of Belgorod, rescue workers have been pulling people from the rubble of a residential building hit in a Ukrainian strike that killed five people.
Russia said yesterday that it had taken six Ukrainian villages, including five in Kharkiv, as it continued to make territorial gains in the war.
The ministry said its forces had “advanced deeply into the enemy defences” and taken villages including Gatishche, Krasnoye, Morokhovets and Oleinikovo. But the Ukrainian army said it was managing to hold back further Russian advances.
At an evacuation point near the front line in Kharkiv region, AFP reporters on Sunday saw groups of people who had been evacuated from around the town of Vovchansk, most of them elderly and disoriented.
“We weren’t going to leave. Home is home,” said 72-year-old Lyuda Zelenskaya, hugging a trembling cat named Zhora.
Liuba Konovalova, 70 said she had endured a “really terrifying” night before her evacuation.
Around them, volunteers assisted evacuees towards a few wooden benches where they registered and received food before being evacuated toward Kharkiv, the regional capital.
“In total, 4,073 people have been evacuated,” Kharkiv regional governor Oleg Synegubov wrote on social media.
Ukraine has reported several civilians killed in the offensive. Synegubov said the latest casualty – a 63-year-old man – was killed by artillery fire in the village of Glyboke.
Meanwhile, a Ukrainian strike on the Russian border city of Belgorod caused the partial collapse of a building that killed at least five people, Russian emergency services said.
“In total five bodies have been taken out of the rubble,” Russia’s emergency situations ministry said on social media, after earlier reporting that four bodies had been found.
Emergency services were quoted by the TASS news agency as saying that 20 people were also injured.
Officials said rescue work had to be repeatedly interrupted because of air raid alerts.
The defence ministry said the Ukrainian army had attacked “residential districts in the city of Belgorod”.
The ministry said one of a series of Ukrainian Tochka-U missiles intercepted by Russian anti-aircraft defences had “damaged” the building.
The emergency situations ministry warned the number of victims could rise as part of the building roof caved in just as rescuers were searching for survivors.
Belgorod governor Viacheslav Gladkov had posted to Telegram a video showing a collapsed building with a huge hole in it.
“Following direct shell fire on a residential building … the entire entrance, from the tenth to the ground floor, collapsed,” Gladkov said, condemning “massive bombings” by the Ukrainian army.
Belgorod is regularly targeted by Ukrainian drone and missile attacks. Kyiv says it is doing so to counter daily bombardments by Russian forces on Ukrainian cities since the war started.
On 30 December, 25 people were killed and about 100 injured in one attack.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say