Russians strike key Ukrainian city
Kramatorsk is best known as command center, staging hub
KRAMATORSK, Ukraine — Russian missiles slammed into Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine on Thursday, striking a city that is a key base of Ukrainian military operations amid warnings from Kyiv that Moscow was opening a new offensive in the 11-month-old war.
Russian attacks were intensifying in Kramatorsk, a longtime command center for the Ukrainian military and a staging ground for Ukraine’s defense of the city of Bakhmut, which Russia has moved closer to capturing after months of brutal fighting. The fall of Bakhmut would be Moscow’s first significant military victory since the summer.
As his military pressed its eastern campaign with missile strikes, President Vladimir Putin used a speech in the city formerly known as Stalingrad on Thursday to invoke the Soviets’ defeat of the Nazis in a decisive World War II battle and vow that Russia would be victorious again.
“We are again and again being forced to resist the aggression of the collective West,” Putin said. “The legacy of generations, values and traditions — this is all what makes Russia different, what makes us strong and confident in ourselves, in our righteousness and in our victory.”
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine has said that a large Russian troop buildup in occupied parts of eastern Ukraine, along with a sharp increase in artillery strikes in the east, signals the start of a new Russian offensive.
Reports of Russian artillery barrages in eastern Ukraine had risen from an average of about 60 per day four weeks ago to more than 90 per day last week, Konrad Muzyka, a military analyst for Rochan Consulting, which tracks Russian deployments, said this week.
On Wednesday night, at least three people were killed and more than a dozen others were wounded when a rocket slammed into a fourstory apartment complex in Kramatorsk.
As rescuers were digging furiously through the rubble on Thursday, trying to find an entry into a basement where residents may have been hiding, there was a flash and two more missiles hit nearby, sending firefighters scampering.
One missile struck a courtyard, mangling several vehicles and a row of garages, and another stuck in the middle of the road. Residents fled to basements as the police warned that additional missiles were coming.
The head of the regional military administration, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said that five people were wounded in the strikes Thursday, which hit more than a dozen buildings.
Kramatorsk is the largest Ukrainian city near the epicenter of the fight for the eastern area known as Donbas. It is a hive of military activity, with the numbers of soldiers and armored personnel carriers growing in recent days. Bakhmut is about 20 miles away, and the entire area comes under bombardment by Russian ordnance almost daily.
Russia has been making slow gains in the east that now pose an imminent threat to Ukrainian control of Bakhmut, the loss of which would add momentum to Moscow’s grinding bid for control of the entire Donbas. But a Russian victory in Bakhmut would come at a huge cost in lives, Ukraine says; the Kremlin has thrown thousands of often inexperienced fighters into brutal ground combat against dug-in Ukrainian forces.
Putin made no mention of Russia’s mounting losses in his speech. Instead, speaking at a “celebratory concert” marking the 80th anniversary of the Soviet triumph in Stalingrad, now known as Volgograd, Putin lashed out again at Western nations, which are sending increasingly advanced weapons to Ukraine. He made his most direct remarks yet in response to Germany’s recent decision to provide Ukraine with Leopard 2 battle tanks, calling it part of “the aggression of the collective West.”
Putin said it was “unbelievable” that Russia was “again being threatened” by German tanks and made a vague threat directed at Germany, which Putin long viewed as Russia’s most important link to the West.
“We aren’t sending our tanks to their borders,” Putin said. “But we have the means to respond, and it won’t end with the use of armor.”
Stalingrad — the turning point in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet Union’s fight against the Nazis in World War II — holds totemic significance for Russians as a symbol of wartime suffering, sacrifice and heroism. In 1943, the Soviets reversed the tide of Germany’s invasion there after a 200-day battle that cost hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians their lives.
After he landed Thursday in Volgograd — about 200 miles east of Ukraine — Russian state media footage showed Putin laying flowers at a Soviet commander’s grave below the nearly 300foot Motherland Calls monument, one of the world’s biggest statues. He was also shown kneeling before a wreath at a memorial flame nearby.
For Putin, the symbolism is a central trope in his messaging to Russians to push them to support his war in Ukraine, with the Kremlin’s propaganda falsely describing the Ukrainians as modern-day Nazis and twisting reality to describe the Russian invasion as a defensive war.