Russian missiles rip into Ukraine residential zone
At least 40 buildings damaged in region claimed by Moscow
KYIV, Ukraine — Russian missiles hit apartment buildings in the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia on Thursday, a local official said, killing three people and wounding at least 12 in a region that Moscow has illegally annexed.
Two strikes damaged more than 40 buildings hours after Ukraine’s president announced that his military had retaken three more villages in another of the four regions annexed by Russia, Moscow’s latest battlefield reversal.
The Zaporizhzhia regional governor, Oleksandr Starukh, wrote on Telegram that many people were rescued from the multistory buildings, including a 3-year-old girl taken to a hospital. Photos showed rescuers scrambling through the wreckage of a building looking for survivors.
“Absolute meanness. Absolute evil,” Ukrainian
President Volodymr Zelenskky said of the attacks, in a video speech to the inaugural summit of the European Political Community in Prague. “There have already been thousands of manifestations of such evil. Unfortunately, there may be thousands more.”
Zaporizhzhia is one of the four regions of Ukraine that Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed as Russian territory in violation of international laws. The region is home to a sprawling nuclear power plant under Russian occupation; the city of the same name remains under Ukrainian control.
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, announced Thursday after meeting with Zelenskyy in Kyiv that the U.N.’s atomic energy watchdog will increase the number of inspectors at the Zaporizhzhia plant from two to four.
Grossi talked with Ukrainian officials — and later will confer in Moscow with Russian officials — about efforts to set up a secure protection zone around the nuclear power station. Grossi said mines appear to have been planted around the perimeter of
the plant, which has been damaged during the war and caused worries of a possible radiation disaster. Zelenskyy said Russia has stationed as many as 500 fighters at the plant.
Putin signed a decree Wednesday declaring that Russia was taking over the six-reactor facility, a move Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry called a criminal act that was “null and void.”
Ukraine’s state nuclear operator, Energoatom, said it would continue to operate the plant, whose last operating reactor was shut down Sept. 11 because of frequent outages of external power needed to run critical safety systems. Transmission lines to the plant have been repeatedly shelled, and Grossi on Thursday reported shelling in an industrial area close to the plant’s access road.
Outside the battlefront, Russian authorities detained several hundred Ukrainians trying to flee Russian-occupied areas Wednesday near the Russian-Estonian border, according to Ukrainian Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets. Citing the Estonian Ministry of Internal Affairs, he wrote on Facebook that Russian
forces took the Ukrainians on trucks to an unknown destination.
Most of the detained Ukrainians had fled through Russia and Crimea and were seeking to enter the European Union — Estonia is a member state — or find a way to return home, Lubinets wrote.
Russian has forced thousands of Ukrainians into “filtration camps” to determine their loyalties. Zelenskyy said Thursday more than 1.6 million Ukrainians have been deported to Russia.
The precise borders of the areas in Ukraine that
Moscow is claiming remain unclear. Putin has vowed to defend Russia’s territory — including the annexed Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine — with any means at his military’s disposal, including nuclear weapons.
The deputy head of the Ukraine president’s office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, said 10 people were killed in the latest Russian attacks in the Dnipro, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. It was not clear if that number included those killed in the morning strikes in Zaporizhzhia.
Ukrainian forces are seizing back villages in Kherson in humiliating battlefield defeats for Russian forces that have badly dented the image of a powerful Russian military. Ukrainian forces said Thursday they have retaken 154 square miles of territory, including 29 settlements, in the Kherson region since Oct. 1.
Ukraine also was pressing a counteroffensive in the Donetsk region, which Moscow-backed separatists have partially controlled since 2014 but which remains contested despite Putin’s proclaimed annexation.