Russia steps up attacks across Ukraine’s north, east and south
Russian forces fired missiles and shells at cities and towns across Ukraine on Saturday after Russia’s military announced it was stepping up its onslaught against its neighbour. Ukraine reported at least 17 more civilians killed.
Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu had given “instructions to further intensify the actions of units in all operational areas, in order to exclude the possibility of the Kyiv regime launching massive rocket and artillery strikes on civilian infrastructure and residents of settlements in the Donbas and other regions,” his ministry said.
Russia’s military campaign has been focusing on the eastern Donbas, but the new attacks hit areas in the north and south as well. Kharkiv, Ukraine’s secondlargest city, has seen especially severe bombardments in recent days, with Ukrainian officials and local commanders voicing fears that a second full-scale Russian assault on the northern city may be looming.
At least three civilians were killed and three more were injured on Saturday in a predawn Russian strike on the northern Ukrainian city of Chuhuiv, near Kharkiv and only 120 kilometres from the Russian border, police said.
Serhiy Bolvinov, the deputy head of the Kharkiv region’s police force, said four missiles presumably fired from the Russian city of Belgorod hit an apartment building, a school and administrative buildings at about 3:30 a.m. Writing on Facebook, he said the three bodies were found under the rubble.
Lyudmila Krekshina, who lives in the apartment building that was hit, said a husband and wife were killed, and also an elderly man who lived on the ground floor.
Another resident said she was lucky to have survived.
“I was going to run and hide in the bathroom. I didn’t make it and that’s what saved me,” said Valentina Bushuyeva. Pointing up at her destroyed apartment, she said: “There’s the bathroom — explosion. Kitchen — half a room. And I survived because I stayed put.” In the neighbouring Sumy region, one civilian was killed and at least seven were injured after Russians opened mortar and artillery fire on three towns and villages close to the Russian border, regional governor Dmytro Zhyvytsky said Saturday.
In the Donetsk region, seven civilians had been killed and 14 wounded in the past 24 hours in Russian attacks on cities, its governor said Saturday.
On the outskirts of Pokrovsk, a city in Donetsk, a woman said a neighbour was killed by a rocket attack Saturday afternoon. Tetiana Pashko said she suffered a cut on her leg and one of her family’s dogs was killed.
She said her 35-year-old neighbour, who died in her front yard, had evacuated this year as authorities requested but had returned home after being unable to support herself. Several homes on the quiet residential street were damaged, with doors and roofs ripped away.
“We can rebuild but we can’t bring her back,” said another neighbour, Olha Rusanova.
In the neighbouring Luhansk region, however, Ukrainian troops repelled a Russian overnight assault on a strategic eastern highway, said Gov. Serhiy Haidai, adding that Russia had been trying to capture the main road between the cities of Lysychansk and Bakhmut for more than two months. The Luhansk and Donetsk regions make up the Donbas, an eastern industrial region that used to power Ukraine’s economy and has mostly been taken over by Russian and separatist forces.
In southern Ukraine, two people were wounded by Russian shelling in the town of Bashtanka, northeast of the Black Sea city of Mykolaiv, according the regional governor, Vitaliy Kim, who denounced Russia as “a terrorist state.”
In Odesa, a key port on the Black Sea, a Russian missile hit a warehouse, engulfing it in flames and sending up a plume of black smoke, but no injuries were reported, officials said.