KRAMATORSK, Ukraine –
Russia stepped up its assault on Ukraine on Saturday, with civilian casualties reported in several areas of the country.
At least three civilians were killed and three more wounded in a Russian rocket attack on the northern Ukrainian city of Chuhuiv in the early hours, a regional police chief said.
Serhiy Bolvinov, deputy chief of the Kharkiv regional police, said the rockets were likely fired from Russian territory. Chuhuiv is located about 120 kilometers from the border.
“Four Russian rockets, presumably fired from (the Russian city of) Belgorod at night, around 3:30, hit a residential building, a school and administrative buildings,” Bolvinov wrote on Facebook, adding that a block of two-story apartment was partially destroyed.
“The bodies of three people were found under the rubble. Three more were injured. The victims are civilians,” added Bolvinov.
In the neighboring Sumy region, one civilian was killed and at least seven more wounded after the Russians opened artillery and mortar fire on three towns and villages not far from the Russian border, regional governor Dmytro Zhyvytsky said on Telegram on Saturday. in the morning.
Seven civilians have been killed and 14 more wounded in the past 24 hours in towns in Ukraine’s besieged eastern Donetsk region, its governor said Saturday morning.
Nearby, however, Ukrainian troops repelled a Russian night assault on a strategic road to the east, said Serhiy Haidai, governor of the Lugansk region.
Haidai said Russia had been trying to capture the main road link between the cities of Lysychansk and Bakhmut “for more than two months.”
“They still cannot control several kilometers of this road,” Haidai wrote in a Telegram post.
Russia’s defense chief told troops to intensify operations throughout Ukraine, according to defense ministry social media updates on Saturday.
A Facebook post said Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu gave “instructions to further intensify unit actions in all operational areas, in order to exclude the possibility of the Kyiv regime launching massive rocket attacks and artillery against civilian infrastructure and residents of settlements in Donbas and other regions.”
According to the publication, Shoigu on Saturday inspected some of the Russian units that have served in Ukraine, handing out awards for bravery.
Russia’s military campaign has focused on Donbas, covering Donetsk and Luhansk, but Russian forces have also been hitting other parts of the country in a relentless drive to wrest territory from Ukraine and dampen the morale of its leaders, civilians and troops as the war progresses. is approaching the five-month mark.
In southern Ukraine, two people were injured by Russian shelling in the town of Bashtanka, northeast of the Black Sea city of Mykolaiv, according to a Telegram post by regional governor Vitaliy Kim.
Kim said that Mykolaiv was also attacked again by Russia in the first hours. On Friday morning, he posted videos of what he said was a Russian missile attack on the city’s two largest universities and denounced Russia as “a terrorist state.”
Two people were killed and a woman was hospitalized after a Russian rocket attack on the eastern riverside city of Nikopol, emergency services said. Dnipropetrovsk Governor Valentyn Reznichenko said on Telegram that a five-story apartment block, a school and a vocational school building were damaged.
On Friday, cruise missiles fired by Russian strategic bombers struck the southeastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro, killing at least three people and wounding 16, Ukrainian officials said.
At a regular news conference on Saturday, Russian defense officials said the attack had destroyed “workshops that produced components and repaired Tochka-U ballistic missiles, as well as multiple rocket launchers.” Spokesman Igor Konashenkov did not respond to Ukraine’s accusations that the attack had killed civilians.
On Thursday, a Russian missile strike killed at least 23 people, including three children, and wounded more than 200 in Vinnytsia, a city southwest of the capital Kyiv, far from the front line.
Russia said the Kalibr cruise missiles hit a “military facility” that was organizing a meeting between the Ukrainian air force command and foreign arms suppliers. The Ukrainian authorities insisted that the site had nothing to do with the army.
Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said on Friday that Russian forces have carried out more than 17,000 attacks on civilian targets during the war, killing thousands of fighters and civilians and driving millions from their homes. The invasion has also hit the world economy by raising prices and hampering exports of key Ukrainian and Russian products, such as grain, fuel and fertilizer.