Time.news – The 51st day of war in Ukraine saw the Pentagon confirm the Kiev version that the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet was sunk by a Ukrainian missile attack, inflicting one of the heaviest blows to the Moscow war effort and providing a powerful symbol of Kiev’s resistance against a militarily strongest enemy on paper.
In the attack – which Moscow continues to deny, claiming it was an explosion on board – Commander Anton Kuprin died and according to the Ukrainian authorities the crew had not been evacuated and there are other victims. For British intelligence, the second shipwreck of the Moscow fleet (another Russian ship sank on 24 March) “it will likely prompt Russia to review its position in the Black Sea“.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry reported that Russian forces used long-range bombers for the first time to attack Mariupol, where street fighting rages on. Moscow claims control of the Ilyich steel plant in the port city besieged for weeks and the killing of 30 “Polish mercenaries” in the eastern region of Kharkiv.
Just in Kharkiv, Russian bombings hit a residential area, killing seven people including a small child and injuring 34 others, according to the regional governor. There was also an attack on the buses used for the evacuation of civilians in the village of Borova, also in the Kharkiv region, where seven people were killed and another 27 injured. In other attacks, there were at least two dead and others injured in Mykolaiv.
Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, said 2,864 people were evacuated from the conflict areas today, including 363 people from Mariupol who used their own means of transport.
Meanwhile, bombing continues on the front line of the Donetsk region: according to the head of the military administration of the region, “almost all the settlements in the Donetsk region along the front line are under attack”.
According to Tass, more than 20 buildings and a school were damaged following the Ukrainian bombing of a Russian village in the Belgorod region yesterday. The Russian Defense Ministry said it hit a military target on the outskirts of Kiev overnight with cruise missiles and promised more attacks on the Ukrainian capital in response to the Ukrainians on Russian territory. The governor of Ukraine’s Lugansk region urged residents of six cities to evacuate, adding that one person had been killed and five wounded in Russian bombing of the town of Kreminna.
Finally, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that it had shot down Ukrainian Tochka-U missiles aimed at the Kakhovskaya hydroelectric plant on the Dnieper. “The destruction of the dam of the power plant”, according to the ministry, “was aimed at causing the flooding of various areas of the Kherson region to limit the actions of the Russian armed forces”