Russian missiles pound east Ukraine, hit Kharkiv
DRUZHKIVKA: Russian troops shelled Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region on Saturday as Ukrainian officials accused Moscow of preparing new attacks and Washington promised new military aid to Kyiv.
Having endured long battles to capture towns in the neighboring Lugansk region, Russia now seeks to push deeper into Donetsk to consolidate its control over the entire Donbas region to the east.
Four and a half months into the war, residents of the city of Druzhkivka, north of Donetsk, woke up on Saturday to a suspected missile attack that ripped through a supermarket and ripped a crater in the ground.
Five people have been killed in the Donetsk region in the past 24 hours and seven have been injured, Ukrainian officials said on Saturday.
Sergiy Gaiday, governor of Lugansk, said the Russians were attacking Donetsk from bases in his region.
“We are trying to contain their armed formations along the entire front line…
Where it is inconvenient for them to advance, they create a real hell, shelling the territories on the horizon,” he said.
Oleksandr Vilkul, mayor of Kryvyi Rih, the hometown of President Volodymyr Zelensky, in central Ukraine, said Russia had targeted the city with cluster bombs, killing at least one person and wounding two.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Saturday it had inflicted heavy losses on the Mykolaiv and Dnepropetrovsk regions in southern and central Ukraine, respectively, and claimed strikes in Donetsk and the Kharkiv region.
Ukrainian emergency services said six civilians were injured, four of whom were taken to hospital, in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, when a rocket smashed through a two-story residential building on Saturday.
‘mass fights’
“The eyes of all the aggressive political movements and regimes in the world are now focused on what Russia is doing against us, against Ukraine,” Zelensky said in an Instagram post.
“Will the world be able to bring real war criminals to justice?” she asked, warning that failure to do so would lead to “hundreds of other assaults.”
Away from the Donbas, the mayor of Mykolaiv pleaded with citizens not to leave the shelters as he said explosions were heard throughout the night.
Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk was quoted by Ukrainian media as urging civilians in the occupied areas to evacuate by any means possible.
“Massive fights are going to happen,” he said.
“The entire front line is under relentless shelling,” the head of the Donetsk military administration, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said in a Telegram message on Friday night.
He accused Russian troops of shelling the city of Sloviansk “day and night” and burning agricultural fields in an attempt to “destroy the harvest by all means”.
Kyrylenko warned that the Russians were in the process of replenishing troops in the region to prepare for further attacks.
In a boost to Kyiv, Washington announced 0 million in additional military aid, including a type of artillery ammunition with “higher precision,” and which has not been sent before.
Recruits train in England
“It is a further evolution in our support for Ukraine in this battle in Donbas,” a senior defense official was quoted as saying by the US Department of Defense.
Also included in the aid package are four additional High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems in addition to the eight that already exist.
Britain’s Defense Ministry said on Saturday that the first group of up to 10,000 inexperienced Ukrainian military recruits had started training in England as part of a UK-led programme.
The United States also pressured Russia at a meeting of Group of 20 foreign ministers in Indonesia.
Washington and its allies condemned Russia’s assault ahead of the meeting before Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov faced what US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called a barrage of Western criticism.
in closed-door talks.
Blinken called on China on Saturday to distance itself from Russia after talks with his Chinese counterpart in Indonesia.
Blinken said he told Wang Yi: “This is really a time when we all have to stand up, as we hear country after country in the G20 doing, to condemn aggression, to demand, among other things, that Russia allows access to food that is caught in Ukraine.”
He added that there were “no signs” that Moscow was willing to participate after the G20 talks.
“If there is an opportunity for diplomacy, we will take it,” he said.
