Russian missiles strike port city of Odessa
Zelensky says Kyiv’s victory is assured
KYIV/KHARKIV: Buildings in Odessa lay in ruins yesterday, a day after Kremlin forces pounded the southern Ukrainian port with missiles and Russian President Vladimir Putin led defiant celebrations marking the Soviet’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two.
While Mr Putin was silent about plans for any escalation, he exhorted Russians to battle and repeated his assertions that they were again fighting Nazis. His forces continued to destroy the infrastructure of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol where the last Ukrainian troops are holding out.
“You are fighting for the Motherland, for its future, so that no one forgets the lessons of World War Two. So that there is no place in the world for executioners, castigators and Nazis,” he said.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, in his own speech on Monday, promised Ukrainians would triumph.
“On the Day of Victory over Nazism, we are fighting for a new victory. The road to it is difficult, but we have no doubt that we will win,” said Mr Zelensky.
In Odessa, the major Black Sea port for exporting agricultural products, one person was killed and five people were injured when seven missiles hit a shopping centre and a depot, Ukraine’s armed forces said on Facebook.
Video footage from the scene showed fire and rescue workers combing through piles of rubble dousing still smoking wreckage.
Ukraine and its allies have intensified efforts on how to unblock ports or provide alternate routes for exporting its significant crops of grain, wheat and corn.
European Council President Charles Michel visited Odessa on Monday, and his meeting with Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal was interrupted by the missile attack.
Their talks continued in a bomb shelter, according to Mr Shmyhal’s official Twitter account.
Air raid sirens could be heard across several regions of Ukraine early yesterday including Luhansk, Kharkiv and Dnipro.
Serhiy Gaidai, the governor of Luhansk, said the region was attacked 22 times in the 24 hours to early yesterday.
“During the day on May 9th, the Russians fired en masse on all possible routes out of the region.”
Houses were destroyed in Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk and in the village of Shypilovo, where people remained trapped, there was an attack on an inspecting crew that wounded one person, Gaidai added.
In the town of Bogodukhov, northwest of Kharkiv, four people were killed and several homes were destroyed in Russian attacks on Monday, local media quoted Kharkiv officials as saying.
Ukraine’s defence ministry said Russian forces backed by tanks and artillery were conducting “storming operations” at Mariupol’s Azovstal plant, where hundreds of Ukrainian defenders have held out through months of siege.
Mariupol lies between the Crimean Peninsula, seized by Moscow in 2014, and parts of eastern Ukraine under the control of Russia-backed separatists. Capturing the city would allow Moscow to link the two areas.
More than 5.5 million Ukrainians have fled their country since Russia’s invasion on Feb 24, according to the United Nations, which has called it Europe’s fastest-growing refugee crisis since World War Two.
Moscow’s gains from the invasion, however, have been slow at best and it has little to show for it beyond a strip of territory in the south and marginal gains in the east.
US President Joe Biden said he was worried Mr Putin “doesn’t have a way out right now, and I’m trying to figure out what we do about that”.
Sources say US Democratic lawmakers have agreed on a $40 billion (1.38 trillion baht) aid proposal for Ukraine.
The White House had earlier described Mr Putin’s Victory Day remarks as “revisionist history that took the form of disinformation.”