Russians pound vital port Odesa

RUSSIAN troops have been pounding the vital port of Odesa, Ukrainian officials said, apparently as part of efforts to disrupt the supply lines and weapons shipments that have been critical to Kyiv’s defence.

The Ukrainian military said Russian forces fired seven missiles on Monday from the air at Ukraine’s largest port, hitting a shopping centre and a warehouse. One person was killed and five wounded, the military said.

Images overnight showed a burning building and detritus in a heap of destruction in the city on the Black Sea. At daybreak, Mayor Gennady Trukhanov visited the warehouse and said it “had nothing in common with military infrastructure or military objects”.

Ukraine alleged at least some of the munitions used dated back to the Soviet era, making them unreliable in targeting, but the Centre for Defence Strategies, a Ukrainian think-tank tracking the war, said Moscow used some precision weapons including Kinzhal hypersonic air-to-surface missiles.

Ukrainian, British and American officials warn Moscow is rapidly using up its stock of precision weapons and may not be able to quickly build more, raising the risk of more imprecise rockets being used as the conflict grinds on.

Ukraine’s ability to fend off a larger and better armed Russian military has surprised many observers.

With the war in its 11th week and Kyiv bogging Russian forces down in many places and even staging a counter-offensive in others, Ukraine’s foreign minister appeared to suggest the country could expand its aims beyond merely pushing Russia back to areas it or its allies held on the day of the February 24 invasion.

One of the most dramatic examples of Ukraine’s ability to deny Moscow easy victories has been Mariupol, where Ukrainian fighters remain holed up at a steel plant despite a long siege. The regiment defending the plant said yesterday that Russian war planes were still pounding it.

In recent days, the United Nations and Red Cross organised a dramatic rescue of what some officials said were the last civilians trapped at the plant but two officials said about 100 were believed to still be in the complex’s underground tunnels.

In another example of the grisly toll the war continues to take, the Ukrainians said they had found the bodies of 44 civilians in the rubble of a building in the north-east that was destroyed weeks ago.

Ever since President Vladimir Putin’s forces failed to take Kyiv in the early days of the war, he has said his focus is the country’s eastern industrial heartland of the Donbas – but one general has suggested Moscow’s aims also include cutting Ukraine off from its Black Sea coast.

That would also give it a stretch of territory that would link Russia to the Crimean peninsula, which it seized in 2014, and Transnistria, a pro-Russian breakaway region of Moldova.

An apartment building in Odesa was damaged by shelling.