Russian forces begin assault on two eastern Ukraine cities
KYIV, UKRAINE
Russian forces began an assault Saturday on two key cities in the eastern Donetsk region and kept up rocket and shelling attacks on other Ukrainian cities, including one close to Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, Ukraine’s military and local officials said.
Both cities of Bakhmut and Avdiivka have been considered key targets of Russia’s ongoing offensive across Ukraine’s east, with analysts saying Moscow needs to take Bakhmut if it is to advance on the regional hubs of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.
“In the Donetsk direction, the enemy is conducting an offensive operation, concentrating its main efforts on the Bakhmut and Avdiivka directions. It uses ground attack and army aviation,” the Ukrainian General Staff said on Facebook.
The last Russian strike on Sloviansk was July 30, but Ukrainian forces are fortifying their positions around the city in expectation of new fighting.
“I think it won’t be calm for long. Eventually, there will be an assault,” Col. Yurii Bereza, head of the volunteer national guard regiment, told The Associated Press.
Russian shelling killed five civilians and injured 14 others in the Donetsk region in the last day, Donetsk governor Pavlo Kyrylenko wrote Saturday on Telegram, saying two people were killed in Poprosny, and one each in Avdiivka, Soledar and Pervomaiskiy.
The governor of the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region said three civilians were injured after Russian rockets fell on a residential neighborhood in Nikopol, a city across the Dnieper River from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station. The nuclear plant has been under Russian control since Moscow’s troops seized it early in the war.
“After midnight, the Russian army struck the Nikopol area with [Sovietera] Grad rockets, and the Kryvyi Rih area from barrel artillery,” Valentyn Reznichenko wrote on Telegram.
Another Russian missile attack overnight damaged unspecified infrastructure in the regional capital of Zaporizhzhia. On Thursday, Russia fired 60 rockets at Nikopol, damaging 50 residential buildings in the city of 107,000 and leaving residents without electricity.
Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned this week that the situation was becoming more perilous day by day at the Zaporizhzhia plant.
“Every principle of nuclear safety has been violated” at the plant, he said. “What is at stake is extremely serious.”
He expressed concern about the way the plant is being operated and the danger posed by the fighting going on around it. Experts at the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War said Russia is shelling the area intentionally, “putting Ukraine in a difficult position.”
The Ukrainian company operating the nuclear power station said Saturday abide by obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
“Rather than treating a world without nuclear weapons like a distant dream, they should be taking concrete steps toward its realization,” he said.
Critics say Kishida’s call for a nuclear-free world is hollow because Japan remains under the U.S. nuclear umbrella and continues to boycott the Treaty on the that Russian troops are using the plant’s basement to hide from Ukrainian shelling and have barred its Ukrainian staff from going there.
“Ukrainian personnel do not yet have access to these premises, so in the event of new shelling, people have no shelter and are in danger,” Enerhoatom, a Ukrainian state enterprise, said on its Telegram channel.
Enerhoatom said Friday that Russian rockets had damaged the plant’s facilities, including a nitrogenoxygen unit and a highvoltage power line. Local Russian-appointed officials acknowledged the damage, but blamed it on the Ukrainians.
In other developments:
In Ukraine’s south, two civilians were seriously injured Saturday after Russian forces fired rockets on the Black Sea port of Mykolaiv before dawn, according to regional authorities. That followed a Friday afternoon attack on Mykolaiv that killed one person and wounded 21 others.
In the Kherson region south of Mykolaiv, the
AAProhibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Kishida said the treaty, which lacks the U.S. and other nuclear powers, is not realistic at the moment and that Japan needs to bridge the divide between nonnuclear and nuclear powers.
Many survivors of the bombings have lasting injuries and illnesses resulting from the explosions and radiation exposure and face discrimination in Japan.
The government began to provide medical support to certified survivors in 1968 after more than 20 years of effort by them.
As of March, 118,935 survivors, whose average age now exceeds 84, are deputy mayor of the Russia-occupied city of Nova Kakhovka was in critical condition after an assassination attempt, the Russian state news agency RIANovosti said, citing the deputy head of the Kherson region, most of which is under Russian control.
The first of three more ships carrying thousands of tons of corn from Ukraine anchored north of Istanbul on Saturday awaiting inspection, the Turkish Defense Ministry said. The Panama-flagged Navi Star, which is carrying 33,000 tons of grain to Ireland, left Odesa on Friday. It is being followed by the Turkishflagged Polarnet and the Maltese-flagged Rojen, carrying over 25,000 tons of corn between them from Chornomorsk.
The neighboring Sumy region, which also borders Russia, has also seen nearconstant shelling and missile strikes. Its governor said Saturday the region was hit more than 60 times from Russian territory over the previous day, and one wounded civilian had to be hospitalized.
AAcertified as eligible for government medical support, according to the Health and Welfare Ministry. But many others, including those who say they were victims of the “black rain” that fell outside of the initially designated areas, are still without support.
Aging survivors, known in Japan as hibakusha, continue to push for a nuclear ban and hope to convince younger generations to join the movement.
Guterres had a message for younger people: “Finish the work that the hibakusha have begun. Carry their message forward. In their names, in their honor, in their memory — we must act.”