Odesa targeted in rocket strikes

ROCKET strikes were said to have hit the city of Odesa yesterday as Russian forces focused efforts on the strategically important Black Sea port in the southwest of Ukraine.

The city’s governor, Maksym Matchenko, said on the Telegram messaging app that there were reports of deaths and injuries.

The strikes are said to have come as people began to flee besieged Mariupol, where they have spent weeks beneath a steel plant where the final Ukrainian military forces are holding out.

Those freed described weeks of bombardments and deprivations as they arrived in Ukrainian-held territory – though the evacuation of others was said to have been delayed.

Video posted online by Ukrainian forces showed elderly women and mothers with small children climbing over a steep pile of rubble from the sprawling Azovstal steel plant and eventually boarding a bus.

More than 100 civilians from the plant were expected to arrive in Zaporizhzhia, about 140 miles northwest of Mariupol, yesterday.

The evacuation, if successful, would represent rare progress in easing the human cost of the almost 10-week war, which has caused particular suffering in Mariupol. Previous attempts to open safe corridors out of the city on the Sea of Azov have broken down.

People fleeing Russian-occupied areas in the past have said their vehicles were fired on and Ukrainian officials have repeatedly accused Russian forces of shelling agreedupon evacuation routes.

Israel, meanwhile, has hit out at Russia over “unforgivable” comments by its foreign minister about Nazism and anti-Semitism – including claims that Adolf Hitler was Jewish.

It has summoned the Russian ambassador in response and leaders said the remarks blamed Jews for their own murder in the Holocaust.

Shelling continues in Pyatikhatki, a neighbourhood in Kharkiv, where residents have been living in bunkers.