Ukraine port city of Odessa hit
KYIV: Explosions rocked the strategic Ukrainian port city of Odessa yesterday, as a top UN official headed to Moscow to try to secure a “humanitarian ceasefire” after evidence emerged of possible civilian killings around Kyiv.
Smoke rose from several areas of the historic Black Sea port, after air strikes shook the city at about 6am. The Ukrainian army said no one was killed. Russia’s defence ministry confirmed the attack, saying “high-precision sea and air-based missiles destroyed an oil refinery and three storage facilities for fuel and lubricants”.
The ministry claimed the targets were supplying fuel to Ukrainian troops. Anton Herashchenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian interior minister, said: “Some of the missiles were shot down by air defence.”
The strikes came with Greece’s Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias expected in the city to deliver humanitarian aid to the municipal authorities.
UN chief Antonio Guterres’ humanitarian envoy Martin Griffiths was meanwhile seeking a halt in the fighting, which Ukraine estimates has left 20 000 people dead, and forced more than 10 million to flee.
He will fly on to Kyiv from Moscow. Both Russia and Ukraine have agreed to meet him, Guterres said.
In the ravaged city of Bucha, just outside the Ukrainian capital, the bodies of nearly 300 civilians were found in mass graves after Russian troops withdrew. Reporters saw at least 20 bodies, all in civilian clothing, strewn across a single street. One man’s hands had been tied behind his back with a white cloth, and his Ukrainian passport left open beside his body.
“All these people were shot,” Bucha’s mayor Anatoly Fedoruk said, adding that 280 other bodies had been buried in mass graves. “These are the consequences of Russian occupation.”
UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said she was “appalled by atrocities in Bucha and other towns in Ukraine” and promised the perpetrators would be held to account before an international war crimes tribunal.
The International Criminal Court has already opened a probe into possible war crimes committed in Ukraine, and several Western leaders, including US President Joe Biden, have accused Russia’s Vladimir Putin of being a “war criminal”.
However, the local ombud in the the eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk said Ukrainian nationalist forces had used disabled and elderly residents of a nursing home in Novokrasnyanka near the city as a human shield. “As soon as Ukrainian armed formations entered the town our employees asked the regional authorities to organise an evacuation. Nationalist battalions stationed in the nursing home told them that any evacuation was prohibited,” Viktoria Serdyukova said yesterday.
Serdyukova said Ukrainian troops opened fire on the nursing home when the advancing Luhansk militias forced them to retreat.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has alleged that Russian soldiers planted mines and other booby traps as they withdraw from northern Ukraine. In a video address on Saturday, he warned returning residents of tripwires and other dangers.
Meanwhile, in an attempt to raise economic pressure on Russia, the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania announced on Saturday that they had stopped all imports of Russian gas.
On talks to end the fighting, Ukrainian negotiator David Arakhamia told local television channels that Russia had “verbally” accepted most of Kyiv’s proposals – except on the issue of Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014. Among the agreed-upon points was that a referendum on Ukraine’s neutral status “will be the only way out of this situation”, Arakhamia said.
Any meeting between Zelensky and Putin would “with a high probability” take place in Turkey, which has sought to mediate the conflict.
As Russian forces withdraw from some northern areas, Moscow appears to be focusing on eastern and southern Ukraine, where it holds vast swathes of territory. In Russia, hundreds of people gathered across the country on Saturday to protest against the war in Ukraine. Police detained 211 people, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors arrests.