Shelling kills 7 Ukrainian villagers
KYIV, Ukraine — Seven people — including a 23-day-old baby girl — were killed in Russian shelling in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region on Sunday, the country’s Internal Affairs Ministry said.
Artillery shelling in the village of Shiroka Balka, on the banks of the Dnieper River killed a family — a husband, wife, 12-year-old boy and 23-dayold girl — and another resident.
Two men were killed in the neighboring village of Stanislav, where a woman was also wounded.
The attack on Kherson prov- ince followed Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar’s comments on Saturday attempting to quell rumors that Ukrainian forces had landed on the occupied left, or east, bank of the Dnieper in the Kherson region.
“Again, the expert hype around the left bank in the Kherson region began. There are no reasons for excitement,” she said.
Kherson regional Gov. Oleksandr Prokudin said Sunday that three people had been wounded in Russian attacks on the province Saturday.
Elsewhere, Ukrainian military officials said Saturday evening that Kyiv’s forces had made progress in the south, claiming some success near a key village in the southern Zaporizhzhia region and capturing other unspecified territories.
Ukraine’s General Staff said they had “partial success” around the tactically important Robotyne area in the Zaporizhzhia region, a key Russian stronghold that Ukraine needs to retake in order to continue pushing south towards Melitopol.
“There are liberated territories. The defense forces are working,” Gen. Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, commander of Ukraine’s southern forces, said of the southern front.
Battles in recent weeks have taken place on multiple points along the over 600-mile front line as Ukraine wages a counteroffensive with Western-supplied weapons and Western-trained troops against Russian forces.
Ukrainian troops have made only incremental gains since launching a counteroffensive in early June.
Meanwhile, a Russian warship on Sunday fired warning shots at a Palau-flagged cargo ship in the southwestern Black Sea, the first time Russia has fired on a merchant ship beyond Ukraine since exiting a landmark U.N.-brokered grain deal last month.
According to Russia’s Defense Ministry, the Sukru Okan was heading northward to the Ukrainian Danube River port of Izmail.
“The captain of the dry-cargo ship did not respond to the request to stop for inspection for the carriage of prohibited goods. To force the ship to stop, warning fire was opened from automatic small arms from a Russian warship,” Russia’s Ministry of Defense wrote on Telegram, adding that the ship later stopped and allowed an inspection team to board.
Last month, Moscow withdrew from a key export agreement that allowed Ukraine to ship millions of tons of grain across the Black Sea for sale on world markets. In the wake of that withdrawal, Russia carried out repeated strikes on Ukrainian ports, including Odesa, and declared wide areas of the Black Sea unsafe for shipping.
In Russia, local officials reported on Sunday that air defense systems shot down three drones over the Belgorod region and one over the neighboring Kursk region, both of which border Ukraine.
Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian border regions are a fairly regular occurrence. Drone attacks deeper inside Russian territory have been on the rise since a drone was destroyed over the Kremlin in early May.