Russia strikes annexed area; more bodies found
KYIV, UKRAINE — Russia concentrated attacks Friday in its increasingly troubled invasion of Ukraine on areas it illegally annexed as the death toll from earlier missile strikes on apartment buildings in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia rose to 12.
Putin this week illegally claimed four regions of Ukraine as Russian territory, including the Zaporizhzhia region that is home to Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, whose reactors were shut down last month.
Fighting near the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant has alarmed the U.N.’S atomic energy watchdog, which on Friday doubled to four the number of its inspectors monitoring plant safeguards. An accident there could release 10 times more potentially lethal radiation than the world’s worst nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in Ukraine 36 years ago, Ukrainian Environmental Protection Minister Ruslan Strilets said Friday.
“The situation with the occupation, shelling, and mining of the Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plants by Russian troops is causing consequences that will have a global character,” Strilets told The Associated Press.
The city of Zaporizhzhia is located 33 miles away from the nuclear plant as a crow flies and remains under Ukrainian control. To cement Russia’s claim to the region, Russian forces bombarded the city with S-300 missiles on Thursday, with more attacks reported Friday.
Ukrainian authorities said the death toll from the strikes on apartment buildings rose to 12 on Friday, while another 12 people wounded in the bombardment remained hospitalized.
Missiles also struck the city overnight, wounding one person, Zaporizhzhia Gov. Oleksandr Starukh said. Russia also used Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones there for the first time and damaged two infrastructure facilities, he said.
With its army losing ground to a Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south and east, Russia has deployed unmanned, disposable Iranian-made drones that are cheaper and less sophisticated than missiles but still can damage targets on the ground.
In other Moscow-annexed areas, Russia’s Defense Ministry reported Friday that its forces had repelled Ukrainian advances near the city of Lyman and retaken three villages elsewhere in the eastern Donetsk region. The ministry also claimed that Russian forces had prevented Ukrainian troops from advancing on several villages in the southern Kherson region.
Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address Friday that this week alone, his military has recaptured 300 square miles of territory in the east and 29 settlements, including six in the Luhansk region, which Putin has annexed. In total, Ukrainian forces have liberated 940 square miles of land and 96 settlements since the beginning of its counteroffensive, he said.
In Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, Russian troops shelled the city of Nikopol overnight, killing one person, wounding another and damaging buildings, natural gas pipelines and electricity systems, the region’s governor reported. Nikopol lies along the Dnieper River across from Russian-held territory near the nuclear plant. The city has been shelled constantly for weeks.
The trail of Russia’s devastation and death from areas where its troops retreated became clearer Friday. A report by Ukrainian First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Yevhen Yenin revealed that 530 bodies of civilians have been found in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region since Sept. 7.
The residents killed during the Russian occupation included 257 men, 225 women and 19 children, with 29 people unidentified, Yenin said. Most of the bodies were found in a previously disclosed mass grave in the city of Izium.