2023-12-30 17:06:31
Moscow accused the Ukrainian army of an attack that left fourteen people dead, including two children, and 108 injured on Saturday in Belgorod, a Russian town near the border, the day after massive strikes killed 39 people in Ukraine.
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“According to the latest information, 12 adults and two children died in Belgorod,” the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry said on Telegram, adding that “108 people, including fifteen children, were injured.”
Images posted online show cars on fire, buildings with broken windows, as well as columns of black smoke rising from some buildings.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was “informed” of this attack on “residential neighborhoods” of the city, said Kremlin spokesperson Dmitri Peskov, according to Russian agencies.
Photo from Reuters
Ukraine regularly carries out strikes in Russia, particularly in the regions closest to its territory, but their toll is generally lower.
Kyiv has not yet reacted to the Russian accusations.
Earlier, the governor of the Belgorod region, Vyacheslav Gladkov, reported the death of two children during a Ukrainian strike in the regional capital.
The authorities did not specify whether these victims were included in the toll communicated by the ministry, or if they were separate strikes.
For his part, the governor of the Russian border region of Bryansk, Alexandre Bogomaz, claimed that a Ukrainian attack had killed “a child born in 2014”.
Ukraine was still counting its dead on Saturday, after intense strikes by Russia the day before on several cities, including the capital Kyiv, which killed 39 people and injured dozens of others.
The wave of attacks, one of the most violent since the start of the war almost two years ago, targeted buildings, a maternity ward and even a shopping center, but also industrial and military infrastructures.
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“At present, there are unfortunately 39 deaths” across the country, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on Saturday, adding that around a hundred people had been injured.
“Nearly 120 towns and villages were affected,” he said, adding that search operations were continuing.
In Kyiv alone, at least 16 people were killed on Friday, according to the local administration.
Bodies continued to be pulled out of the rubble on Saturday in this city, where deadly attacks had become rarer in recent months.
This attack was “the most significant in terms of civilian victims,” said Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko on Saturday, who declared a “day of mourning” for January 1.
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Air Force spokesman Yuri Ignat called it the “most massive missile attack” of the conflict, excluding the first days of the war.
Friday’s Russian strikes drew strong international condemnation, with the UN secretary-general speaking out against “appalling attacks”.
These attacks end a difficult year for Ukraine, marked by the failure of its summer counter-offensive and a revival of Moscow’s forces, who this week claimed the capture of the town of Marinka on the eastern front.
This news is all the more worrying for Kyiv as Western aid is beginning to run out of steam, in Europe as in the United States, raising the risk of a drying up of the flow of munitions and funds.
On Saturday, Volodymyr Zelensky launched a new appeal to his allies, assuring that arming Ukraine is “a way to protect lives”.
“Each manifestation of Russian terror proves that we cannot wait to provide assistance to those who are fighting,” he argued.
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Words which echo those of his American counterpart Joe Biden, who called on his country’s elected officials to “act without further delay” to help Kyiv.
Washington has just released a new tranche of $250 million, the last without a new vote in Congress, which is refusing for the moment to allocate more aid.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban vetoed a new EU aid package, a problem that Europeans hope to resolve at a summit in early February 2024.
Poland, a NATO member country, denounced on Friday a “violation” of its airspace “by a cruise missile”, calling on Russia to “immediately cease this type of operation”.
In November 2022, a Ukrainian missile fell on the Polish village of Przewodow, near Ukraine, killing two civilians and briefly sparking fears of an extension of the conflict.
Russia calls for UN Security Council meeting
Russia announced that it had requested a meeting of the UN Security Council after Saturday’s strike on Belgorod, which killed at least 14 people and for which it blamed Ukraine.
“We have requested a meeting of the Security Council on Belgorod for 3 p.m. New York time”, or 8 p.m. GMT, said the deputy Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Dmitri Polianski, on Telegram.
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