RUSSIA HITS KYIV WITH MISSILES AS G-7 LEADERS HOLD TALKS
West prepares new bans on Russian gold in bid to further isolate Moscow
KYIV, Ukraine
Russia shattered weeks of relative calm in the Ukrainian capital with long-range missiles fired toward Kyiv early Sunday, an apparent Kremlin show of force as Western leaders meet in Europe to strengthen their military and economic support of Ukraine.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said the missiles hit at least two residential buildings, and President Volodymr Zelenskyy said a 37-yearold man was killed and his 7-yearold daughter and wife injured. Associated Press journalists saw emergency workers battling flames and rescuing civilians.
The strikes also damaged a nearby kindergarten, where a crater pocked the courtyard. President Joe Biden called the attacks “barbarism” after he arrived in Germany for a Group of Seven summit.
Later Sunday, a local official reported a second death, telling the Unian news agency that a railroad worker was killed and several others were injured in the attacks while servicing rail infrastructure.
Ukrainian air force spokesman Yuriy Ignat said the first airlaunched weapons successfully to target the capital since June 5 were Kh-101 cruise missiles fired from warplanes over the Caspian Sea, more than 900 miles away.
Kyiv’s mayor told journalists he thought the airstrikes were “maybe a symbolic attack” ahead of a NATO summit in Madrid that starts Tuesday. A former commander of U.S. forces in Europe said the strikes also were a signal to the leaders of G-7 nations meeting Sunday in Germany.
“Russia is saying, ‘We can do this all day long. You guys are powerless to stop us,’” retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the former commanding general of U.S. Army forces in Europe, said. “The Russians are humiliating the leaders of the West.”
The G-7 leaders also announced the latest in a long series of international economic steps to pressure and isolate Russia over its war in Ukraine: new bans on imports of Russian gold.
Biden and the British government said members of the Group of 7 — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain and the U.S. — would move Tuesday to ban imports of Russian gold. Representatives for the assembled countries were also negotiating toward an agreement to buy Russian oil only at a steep discount.
Standing with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the three-day meeting’s host, Biden said of the missile strikes on Kyiv: “It’s more of their barbarism.”
Zelenskyy, speaking in his nightly video address, appealed to the G-7 leaders for more help, saying stopping Russian aggression “is possible only if we get everything we ask for, and in the time we need it — weapons, financial support and sanctions against Russia.”
A Ukrainian parliament member, Oleksiy Goncharenko, wrote on the Telegram messaging app that preliminary information indicated that Russia launched 14 missiles toward the capital region and Kyiv itself. Zelenskyy said some were intercepted, and he vowed revenge against “all pilots, dispatchers, technicians
and other people who ensure the launch of missiles in Ukraine.”
“We will find you all. Each of you will be responsible for these blows,” Zelenskyy vowed. “And if someone thinks he will evade responsibility by saying that this was an order, you are wrong. When your missiles hit homes, it’s a war crime. The court is what awaits you all. And you will not hide anywhere — neither on the shores of the Caspian Sea, over which your missiles are launched, nor in Belarus. Nowhere.”
In a phone interview, Hodges told The Associated Press that Russia has a limited stock of precision missiles and “if they are using them, it’s going to be for a special purpose,”
Russia has denied targeting civilians during the 4month-old war, and Hodges said it was hard to know if the missiles launched Sunday were intended to strike the
apartment buildings.
Russian forces tried to seize control of Kyiv early in the war. After Ukrainian troops repelled them, the Kremlin largely shifted its focus to southern and eastern Ukraine.
Russian rocket strikes in the city of Cherkasy, about 100 miles southeast of Kyiv, killed one person and injured five, regional governor Ihor Taburets said Sunday.
In the east, Russian troops fought to consolidate their gains by battling to swallow up the last remaining Ukrainian stronghold in Luhansk province. Luhansk Gov. Serhiy Haidai said Sunday that Russia was conducting intense airstrikes on the city of Lysychansk, destroying its television tower and seriously damaging a road bridge.
“There’s very much destruction. Lysychansk is almost unrecognizable,” he wrote on Facebook.
For weeks, Lysychansk
and the nearby city of Sievierodonetsk have been subject to a bloody and destructive offensive by Russian forces and their separatist allies aimed at capturing all of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.
They have made steady and slow progress, with Haidai confirming Saturday that Sievierodonetsk, including
a chemical plant where hundreds of Ukrainian troops and civilians were holed up, had fallen.
On the economic front, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said banning imports of Russian gold would represent a significant escalation of sanctions.
“That is the second-most lucrative export that Russia has after energy,” Blinken told CNN. “It’s about $19 billion a year. And most of that is within the G-7 countries. So cutting that off, denying access to about $19 billion of revenues a year, that’s significant.”
Russia is poised to default on its foreign debt for the first time since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, further alienating the country from the global financial system following international sanctions imposed over its war in Ukraine.
The country faced a Sunday night deadline to meet a 30-day grace period on interest payments originally due May 27. But it could take time to confirm a default.
Russia calls any default artificial because it has the money to pay its debts but says sanctions have frozen its foreign currency reserves held abroad.