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Tag Archives: Mykolaiv
Blasts rock Ukraine’s Mykolaiv after Russian missiles kill 21 near Odesa
SERHIIVKA, Ukraine, July 2 (Reuters) – Powerful explosions rocked the Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv early on Saturday, the mayor said, a day after authorities said at least 21 people were killed when Russian missiles struck an apartment building near the Black Sea port of Odesa.
Air raid sirens sounded across the Mykolaiv region, which borders the vital exporting port of Odesa, before the blasts.
“There are powerful explosions in the city! Stay in shelters!” Mykolaiv mayor Oleksandr Senkevich wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
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It was not immediately known what caused the explosions. Reuters could not independently verity the report.
Explosions flattened part of an apartment building while residents slept on Friday, another in a series of what Ukraine says are Russian missile attacks aimed at civilians.
In his nightly video address on Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy denounced the strikes as “conscious, deliberately targeted Russian terror and not some sort of error or a coincidental missile strike.”
Kyiv says Moscow has intensified its long-range missile attacks, hitting civilian targets far from the frontline. Russia says it has been aiming at military sites. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov cited President Vladimir Putin’s statements “that the Russian Armed Forces do not work with civilian targets”.
SIFTING THROUGH RUBBLE
A Russian missile earlier this week struck a crowded shopping mall in central Ukraine, killing at least 19 people.
Thousands of civilians have been killed since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24 in what Moscow calls a “special operation” to root out nationalists. Ukraine and its Western allies say it is an unprovoked war of aggression.
Residents in the resort village of Serhiivka near Odesa helped workers pick through the rubble of the nine-storey apartment block, a section of which had been destroyed in Friday’s early-morning strike.
Walls and windows of a neighbouring 14-storey apartment block were damaged by the blast wave. Nearby holiday camps were also hit.
“We came here to the site, assessed the situation together with emergency workers and locals, and together helped those who survived. And those who unfortunately died. We helped to carry them away,” said Oleksandr Abramov, who lives nearby and had rushed to the scene when he heard the blast.
Serhiy Bratchuk, spokesman for the Odesa regional administration, said 21 people had been confirmed killed, including a 12-year-old boy. Among the fatalities was an employee of the Children’s Rehabilitation Center set up by Ukraine’s neighbour Moldova in the resort.
The region will observe a day of mourning on Saturday for those killed during the attack, Bratchuk said.
The strike on Serhiivka took place shortly after Russia pulled its troops off Snake Island, a strategically important outcrop about 140 km (85 miles) southeast of Odesa that it seized on the war’s first day.
The chief of Ukraine’s General Staff, Valeriy Zaluzhny, accused Russia of failing to abide by its assertions that it had left Snake Island as a “gesture of good will”. On his Telegram channel, Zaluzhny said two Russian warplanes had taken off from a base in Crimea and bombed targets on the island on Friday evening.
He posted a video of what he said was the attack. Reuters could not confirm the authenticity of the video or the Russian action depicted. There was no immediate Russian comment.
Russian forces had used Snake Island to control the northwestern Black Sea and impose a blockade on Ukraine, one of the world’s biggest grain exporters.
Moscow denies it is to blame for a food crisis, which it says is caused by Western sanctions hurting its own exports.
Putin met the president of Indonesia on Thursday and spoke by phone on Friday to the prime minister of India, promising both major food importers that Russia would remain a big supplier of grain.
Ukraine has accused Russia of stealing grain from the territories that Russian forces have seized since its invasion.
The Kremlin has denied stealing grain and did not reply to requests for comment on Friday.
NO GAS, ELECTRICITY, WATER
Russia’s stepped-up campaign of missile attacks on Ukrainian cities coincides with its forces grinding out success on the battlefield in the east, with the aim of forcing Ukraine to cede Luhansk and Donetsk provinces.
Moscow has been on the verge of capturing Luhansk since taking the city of Sievierodonetsk last week after some of the heaviest fighting of the war.
Ukraine’s last bastion in Luhansk is Sievierodonetsk’s sister city, Lysychansk, across the Siverskyi Donets river, which is close to being encircled under Russian artillery barrages.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of the Donetsk region, said four civilians were killed in the region in Russian shelling on Friday and 12 were injured.
The General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces reported widespread Russian shelling on Friday, including Kharkiv in the north, and an artillery attack on the positions of Ukrainian troops in the border areas of Sumy and Chernihiv.
More weapons were needed in eastern and southern Ukraine, Zelenskiy said, as the Pentagon announced the United States was sending two NASAMS surface-to-air missile systems, four additional counter-artillery radars and ammunition as part of its latest arms package. read more
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Reporting by Reuters bureaux; Writing by Lincoln Feast; Editing by William Mallard
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‘Ukraine will definitely win’ says president on visit to Mykolaiv | Ukraine
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said “Ukraine will definitely win” during a working trip to the southern city of Mykolaiv, as relentless fighting in the country’s east continued.
The president handed out medals and posed for selfies with the servicemen in what appeared to be an underground shelter, according to a video posted to his official Telegram account.
“Our brave men. Each one of them is working flat out,” he said. “We will definitely hold out! We will definitely win.”
Russian forces reached the outskirts of Mykolaiv in early March but were then pushed back to the eastern and southern edges of the region, where fierce fighting continues.
“The president inspected the building of the Mykolaiv regional state administration which was destroyed as a result of a missile strike by Russian forces,” Zelenskiy’s office said.
A Russian missile blasted a hole through the building in late March, killing 37 people.
Ukraine has made slow gains in its aim to liberate Kherson, one of Ukraine’s most strategically important Black Sea cities, which is located less than 70 miles from Mykolaiv.
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On Saturday morning, Ukrainian media reported that a car blast in Kherson injured the prisons head, in what appears to have been an attack conducted by Ukrainian partisans operating in occupied Russian territory.
There has been an increase in Ukrainian partisan warfare, particularly in the country’s south around Kherson.
During his nightly national address on Friday, Zelenskiy announced that the celebrated medic nicknamed “Taira”, Yuliia Paievska, whose footage was smuggled out of the besieged city of Mariupol by an Associated Press team, was released by Russian forces three months after she was taken captive there.
“I’m grateful to everyone who worked for this result. Taira is already home. We will keep working to free everyone,” he said.
Paievska transferred the clips to two Associated Press journalists who were the last international reporters in the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol. One of the two journalists managed to escape, hiding the clips in a tampon on 15 March. Paievska was taken hostage the next day.
In its latest intelligence briefing, Britain’s defence ministry said Russia was likely to have renewed its advance in the east of Ukraine, with the intention to penetrate deeper into the Donetsk region and envelope the pocket around the embattled city of Sievierodonetsk from the north.
Russia aims to fully capture Sievierodonetsk, a key city in its push for full control of the eastern Luhansk region.
More than 500 civilians, including 40 children, are believed to be trapped inside the Azot factory in the city. Weeks of Russia’s relentless bombardment of Sievierodonetsk, including its industrial area, have reduced much of the city to rubble.
The shelling of the Azot plant echoes the earlier bloody siege of the Azovstal steelworks in the southern port of Mariupol, where hundreds of fighters and civilians took shelter from Russian shelling.
Britain also warned on Saturday that Russia was likely to claim justification in making less of a distinction between civilian and Ukrainian military targets in the area if civilians in Sievierodonetsk did not take up the Russian offer to evacuate via existing corridors. Moscow has previously accused Ukraine of disrupting plans to open a humanitarian corridor for civilians to leave the area.
The evacuation planned to bring civilians from the Azot plant to Svatove, a city north of Sievierodonetsk controlled by pro-Russian forces.
Overnight Russian shelling also damaged a municipal building and started a fire in a block of flats in Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, the regional governor said.
Peace negotiations between the two countries have largely stalled as the fighting has turned into a grinding war of attrition, with both sides indicating that a return to talks may be difficult.
On Saturday, the head of Ukraine’s negotiating team, David Arakhamia, said talks with Russia could resume in late August after Kyiv conducts “a series of counter-offensive operations”.
Commenting on Arakhamia’s statements, Dmitry Medvedev, the chair of Russia’s security council and a former president, wrote on his Telegram page that by August “the question will be whether we will have someone to talk to”, in the latest string of statements by senior Russian officials that questioned Ukraine’s statehood.
CNN team near Mykolaiv just meters away from incoming artillery rounds
The United States is supporting a multinational team to collect and analyze evidence of atrocities in Ukraine, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said Monday.
“Right now, at the request of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, the United States is supporting a multinational team of international prosecutors to the region to directly support the efforts of the Prosecutor General’s War Crimes Unit to collect, preserve and analyze evidence of atrocities with a view towards pursuing criminal accountability,” Price said at a State Department briefing.
“Those responsible for atrocities must be held accountable, as must those who ordered them. They cannot and will not act with impunity,” Price added.
Price also said that based on the reports the US has seen, the atrocities “are not the act of a rogue soldier,” but rather “part of a broader, troubling campaign.”
He noted that “as Russia’s forces have retreated over the past few days, the world has been shocked by the horrifying images of the Kremlin’s brutality in Bucha and other cities near Kyiv. Civilians, many with their hands tied apparently executed in the streets, others in mass graves.”
“We are seeing credible reports of torture, rape, and civilians executed alongside their families,” he said. “There are reports and images of a nightmare litany of atrocities including reports of landmines and booby traps left behind by Putin’s forces to injure even more civilians and slow the stabilization and recovery of devastated communities after they failed in their objective and withdrew.”
“In keeping with its long track record of accusing others of its own heinous acts, the Kremlin issued a baseless and shameless denial of what we can all clearly see in Bucha and throughout the liberated towns of Kyiv oblast,” he said.
More background: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced on March 23 that the US government had determined that members of the Russian armed forces are committing war crimes in Ukraine.
At the time, Beth Van Schaack, ambassador-at-Large for global criminal justice, said the US government would “continue to track reports coming out of Ukraine of war crimes, and we will share this information with our friends and allies and with international and multilateral institutions, as appropriate.”
“This is going to be an ongoing process throughout this conflict,” she said.
Blinken reiterated this in his interview with CNN’s State of the Union Sunday, saying, “Since the aggression, we’ve come out and said that we believe that Russian forces have committed war crimes and we’ve been working to document that, to provide the information that we have to the relevant institutions and organizations that will put all of this together, and there needs to be accountability for it.”