Kremlin ramps up its attack on crucial port

KYIV: Russia has launched a fresh assault on the critical Ukrainian port of Odessa as the US warned Moscow was preparing formally to annex embattled regions in the east.

The new heavy fighting came as the EU said it was bracing for a complete end to Russian gas supplies, with the bloc preparing another package of sanctions sure to anger President Vladimir Putin.

After failing to take the capital Kyiv, Moscow has shifted its two-month-old invasion to largely Russianspeaking areas and has stepped up pressure on Odessa,

a cultural hub that is also a crucial port on the Black Sea.

Odessa’s city council said a Russian strike hit a residential building housing five people. A 15-year-old boy was killed and a girl was hospitalised, the council said.

“A 14-year-old boy was killed. A 17-year-old girl was wounded, she has a shrapnel wound,” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address, giving a different age for the boy.

“For what? What did these children threaten the Russian state with? And that’s how they fight. That’s all,” he said.

Fighting was particularly intense in eastern Ukraine around Izyum, Lyman and Rubizhne as the Russians prepared an attack on Severodonetsk, the farthest city still under Kyiv’s control.

In Lyman, relentless shelling has reduced hamlets around the city to rubble.

“Half of the city is destroyed,” said one resident, lifting luggage onto the roof of his beat-up car. “I don’t have a house any more.”

The governor of the eastern region of Luhansk expected more intense battles ahead of May 9, the day Russia annually celebrates the 1945 surrender of Nazi Germany to allied forces, including the thenSoviet Union.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, however, told Italian television that Moscow’s forces “will not artificially adjust their actions to any date, including Victory Day”.

Whatever Russia’s military decisions, the US warned that Moscow was preparing imminently to annex both Luhansk and neighbouring Donetsk.

Pro-Russian separatists in the two regions declared independence in 2014, but Moscow has so far stopped short of formally incorporating them as it did that year with the Crimean peninsula, which it seized illegally through special forces in unmarked uniforms.

“Russia plans to engineer referenda upon joining some time in mid-May,” said Michael Carpenter, the US ambassador to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

“Such sham referenda – fabricated votes – will not be considered legitimate, nor will any attempts to annex additional Ukrainian territory,” he said, adding: “We have to act with a sense of urgency.”