Russian forces maintained their pressure on the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine on Saturday, particularly around Kharkiv in the northeast, where they are trying at all costs to increase their control, despite, according to kyiv, setbacks on the field.
Violent explosions were heard overnight from Friday to Saturday in Kharkiv, the country’s second largest city, pounded for weeks by Russian artillery.
Friday, these bombardments made at least one dead and several wounded, according to the regional military administration of Kharkiv.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged that the situation in this northeastern region, where Russian forces have refocused their offensive, was “difficult”. “But our military is achieving tactical success,” he said.
This is particularly the case in Rouska Lozova, a village taken over by the Ukrainians north of Kharkiv, from where the Russian forces pounded the city according to them. The village was liberated after intense fighting, and more than 600 residents were evacuated, according to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry.
“We had two nights that were scary, like hell… The penultimate night we thought the sky was burning, the whole village was burning,” 23-year-old Svitlana Perepilitsa told AFP. .
“We stayed in the basements without food for two months, we ate what we had,” said Svyatoslav, 40, his eyes red with fatigue, refusing to give his last name.
Further south and east, in the Donbass region, which the Kremlin has set itself the objective of fully recapturing, “the occupiers are doing everything to destroy all life”, asserted Volodymyr Zelensky, considering that “the constant bombardments on infrastructure and inhabited areas show that Russia wants to make this area uninhabited.”
But for Washington, the Russian offensive is lagging behind. According to a senior Pentagon official, the Russian forces “are far from having made the connection” of the troops entering by the Kharkhiv region, north of Donbass, with those coming from the south of the country, one of the objectives of the army to take in the pincers the Ukrainian forces deployed on the front line around the separatist zones of Donetsk and Lugansk.
But “we believe they continue to create the conditions for a sustained, larger and longer offensive,” he added.
And to better affirm their determination, the Russian forces clearly assumed on Friday that they had bombed the capital kyiv the day before, at the precise moment when the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was there.
“Russian forces have destroyed, with long-range high-precision weapons, the workshops of the space company Artyom” in the Ukrainian capital, the Russian Ministry of Defense declared in particular.
This bombing left ten injured and at least one dead: Vira Ghyrytch, a Ukrainian journalist with Radio Liberty, a media outlet funded since the Cold War era by the American Congress in Eastern Europe. The journalist’s body was found in the rubble of her building.
The attack occurred when the head of the United Nations, who made his first trip to Ukraine on Wednesday and Thursday since the start of the Russian invasion on February 24, was in kyiv.
Germany and France strongly condemned, Berlin stressing that these strikes showed once again “that (Vladimir) Putin and his regime have no respect for international law”.
Mr. Zelensky, regretted in a video address on Friday evening, “that such a brutal and deliberate humiliation of the United Nations has gone unanswered”.
Washington for its part accused President Vladimir Putin on Friday of “depravity” and “cruateness” for the way Russian forces behave in Ukraine. “It’s hard to look at some footage and imagine a serious leader doing this,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said.
UN secretary-general traveled Thursday to Buchha and other locations near Kyiv where Ukraine blamed Russian forces for abuses and urged Moscow to ‘cooperate’ with ICC investigation about possible war crimes.
At the same time, the services of the General Prosecutor of Ukraine Iryna Venediktova revealed that ten Russian soldiers were indicted for alleged war crimes in Boutcha.
This is the first measure of this type taken since the bodies of twenty people wearing civilian clothes were discovered on April 2 by AFP lying in a street in this locality, arousing condemnation and commotion around the world.
The Ukrainians blamed the Russians, but Moscow denied any responsibility and spoke of a “staging” of kyiv.
“More than 8,000 cases” of alleged war crimes have in total been identified in Ukraine, said the prosecutor.
In this regard, investigators will be sent by the United Kingdom to help their Ukrainian colleagues, British Foreign Minister Liz Truss said on Friday.
In Mariupol, a port city in southern Ukraine, an evacuation operation was scheduled for Friday. The United Nations coordinator in Ukraine, Osnat Lubrani, said on Thursday that he was going to the south to prepare for this new evacuation attempt, Mr. Guterres assuring that the UN was doing “everything possible” to extract the civilians caught in “the apocalypse”.
Several hundred Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are entrenched in underground galleries dating from Soviet times in the immense metallurgical complex of Azovstal.
AFP was able to hear heavy shelling in Azovstal on Friday morning and until mid-afternoon, during a press trip to Mariupol organized by the Russian army.
In the early afternoon, the explosions were spaced only a few seconds apart, some appearing particularly powerful. Columns of gray smoke sometimes rose in the sky of the industrial zone.
On the diplomatic front, while the Russian president was invited like his Ukrainian counterpart to the G20 summit scheduled for November in Indonesia, the United States said it refused to deal with Vladimir Putin “as if nothing had happened”.
Norway will follow in the footsteps of the European Union, of which it is not a member, by closing its ports to Russian ships, with the exception of trawlers. A first ship loaded with corn from Ukraine left the Romanian port of Constanta on the Black Sea on Friday, marking the resumption of grain exports by the country.
burx / ob / roc