Ukraine: 15 killed as Russia pounds rockets on Kharkiv

KYIV/KHARKIV: Russian forces pounded Ukraine’s second largest city Kharkiv and surrounding countryside with rockets, killing at least 15 people, in what Kyiv called a bid to force it to pull resources from the main battlefield to protect civilians from attack.

Inside Russia, a fire tore through an oil refinery just 8km from the Ukrainian border. Russia’s TASS news agency quoted a local official as saying it had been struck by a drone.

The Russian strikes on Kharkiv, throughout Tuesday and continuing on Wednesday morning, were the worst for weeks in the area where normal life had been returning since Ukraine pushed Russian forces back in a major counter-offensive last month.

“It was shelling by Russian troops. It was probably multiple rocket launchers. And it’s the missile impact, it’s all the missile impact,” Kharkiv prosecutor Mikhailo Martosh told Reuters amid the ruins of cottages struck on Tuesday in a rural area on the city’s outskirts.

Medical workers carried the body of an elderly woman out of the rubble of a burnt-out garage and into a nearby van.

Ukrainian authorities said 15 people were killed and 16 wounded on Tuesday in shelling in the Kharkiv region, with reports of more casualties from strikes overnight and on Wednesday morning.

“Russian forces are now hitting the city of Kharkiv in the same way that they previously were hitting Mariupol - with the aim of terrorising the population,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said in a video address.

“And if they keep doing that we will have to react - and that is one way to make us move our artillery,” he said.

Kharkiv suffered punishing Russian shelling for the first three months of the war, but had largely been spared since the Ukrainian counter-offensive more than a month ago.

The main battlefield is now to the south in the Donbas region, which Moscow has been trying to seize on behalf of its separatist proxies. Ukrainian forces in the Donbas have largely been withstanding the Russian assault so far, with Moscow making only slow progress despite deploying overwhelming artillery in some of the heaviest ground fighting in Europe since World War Two.