Russian strikes on Ukraine kill 2 foreign aid workers
KYIV, Ukraine — Two foreign aid workers were reportedly killed in eastern Ukraine on Sunday as Russian shelling hit a van carrying a team of four working with a Ukrainian nongovernmental organization, while dozens of Russian drones targeted Kyiv and wounded at least one civilian.
The four volunteers from the Road to Relief group, which helps evacuate wounded people from front-line areas, were trapped inside the van as it flipped over and caught fire after being struck by shells near the town of Chasiv Yar, the organization said on its Instagram page.
Road to Relief said that Anthony Ihnat, of Canada, died in the attack, while German medical volunteer Ruben Mawick and Swedish volunteer Johan Mathias Thyr were seriously wounded.
Road to Relief added that it couldn’t trace the whereabouts of the van’s fourth passenger, Emma Igual, a
Spanish national who was the organization’s director. Hours later, Spain’s acting Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares told Spanish media that authorities in Madrid had received “verbal confirmation” of the
32-year-old Igual’s death.
The volunteers were on their way to assess the needs of civilians on the outskirts of Bakhmut, Road to Relief said, in reference to the eastern town that saw the war’s longest and bloodiest battle
before falling to Moscow in May. Ukrainian forces have held on to Bakhmut’s western suburbs and are pushing a counteroffensive in the area.
Also Sunday, Ukrainian officials reported that Russia launched “dozens” of drones at Kyiv and the surrounding region early in the morning, wounding at least five civilians.
The governor of the Kyiv region, which surrounds but doesn’t include the capital, also reported that the drone strike wounded four people across the province, one of whom had to be hospitalized. In a Facebook post, Gov. Ruslan Kravchenko said that the drones damaged an infrastructure facility as well as civilian buildings including homes and stores, a hospital, a rehabilitation center, a school and a kindergarten.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said in the early hours of Sunday that Moscow’s forces earlier destroyed three U.S.-supplied speedboats carrying Ukrainian soldiers that had been traveling toward Russian-occupied Crimea.
The claim couldn’t be independently verified.
Earlier on Sunday, the ministry said in a separate statement that Russian air defenses shot down eight Ukrainian drones targeting
Crimea, as well as another that flew over the Bryansk region bordering Ukraine.
Ukrainian army representatives on Sunday reported small gains near Robotyne in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, where Kyiv has mounted a counteroffensive, days after Russian-installed authorities acknowledged that Russian forces had left.
Russian authorities on Sunday reported multiple attempts to sabotage voting in local elections taking place in occupied areas of Ukraine.
Polls have closed after local elections were held over the weekend in 79 regions of Russia, with ballots for governors, regional legislatures, city and municipal councils, as well as in the four Ukrainian regions Moscow annexed illegally last year — the Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia provinces — and on the Crimean Peninsula.
Balloting in the occupied areas of Ukraine has been denounced by Kyiv and the West as a sham and a violation of international law.