প্রকাশ: 12/07/2022
Rescuers pulled survivors on Monday from an apartment block
destroyed by a Russian missile strike that killed 31 people in eastern Ukraine,
president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said while lamenting Moscow’s firepower advantage
despite billions in Western aid.
The civilian deaths hammered home the human cost of Russia’s
invasion, now in its fifth month, as Russian president Vladimir Putin’s forces
push to capture all of Ukraine’s industrial Donbas region after declaring
victory in one of its two provinces this month.
In the city of Chasiv Yar, rescue workers made voice contact
with two people in the wreckage of the five-storey building demolished on
Saturday. Video showed them pulling survivors from the debris, where up to two
dozen people had been trapped.
But the death toll also rose steadily, Ukraine’s State
Emergency Service said, as more bodies were pulled from under ruined concrete.
In a nightly address, Zelenskiy said 31 people had been killed and nine saved
from the rubble.
One survivor, who gave her name as Venera, said she had
wanted to save her two kittens.
“I was thrown into the bathroom, it was all chaos, I was in
shock, all covered in blood,” she said, crying. “By the time I left the
bathroom, the room was full up of rubble, three floors fell down.
“I never found the kittens.”
Rescuers could be seen lifting one person from the ruins to
a stretcher, and carrying away two bodies in white bags.
Military experts say Russia is using barrages like the one
on Chasiv Yar in Donetsk province to pave the way for a renewed push for
territory by ground forces, after claiming victory in Luhansk province on 4
July. Both have been partly controlled by Russian-backed separatists since
2014.
Putin, who says he aims to hand control of Donbas to the
separatists, on Monday eased rules for Ukrainians to acquire Russian
citizenship.
“(Russia) indeed unfortunately has a big advantage in
artillery,” president Zelenskiy told reporters in Kyiv earlier on Monday
alongside Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.
“With all the partners who are ready to give support, I talk
about artillery. There is indeed not enough.”
A spokesman for Ukraine’s International Legion, a fighting
unit of foreign troops, said Ukraine’s heavy artillery was outnumbered roughly
eight to one by Russian guns.
Reuters could not independently verify battlefield accounts.
‘I Saw Lights’
Further north in the second-largest city of Kharkiv, Russian
artillery, rocket and tank attacks killed three and injured 31, including two
children, regional governor Oleh Synehubov said.
At least one strike hit a residential building in the city,
where a column of flats had collapsed into rubble.
“I saw lights, the headlights of rescuers and I started
screaming ‘I am alive, please get me out’,” survivor Valentina Popovichuk told
Reuters on a nearby Kharkiv street.
She was asleep when her building was hit three or four times
in the early morning. “The rescuers entered the hallway, knocked down the door
and took me out.”
Kharkiv, in the northeast close to the Russian border but
outside the Donbas, suffered heavy bombardment in the first few months of the
war followed by a period of relative calm that has been shattered by renewed
shelling in recent weeks.
Moscow denies targeting civilians but many Ukrainian cities,
towns and villages have been left in ruins. Since the 24 February invasion,
attacks on a theatre, shopping centre and railway station have caused many
civilian deaths.
Zelenskiy said Russia had carried out 34 air strikes since
Saturday.
Diplomatic Faultlines
The war has exposed diplomatic faultlines across Europe and
sent energy and food prices soaring.
The West aims to reopen Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, which it
says are shut by a Russian blockade, halting exports from one of the world’s
main sources of grain and threatening to exacerbate global hunger.
Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan, who has offered to mediate
on the grain issue, discussed it with Putin by telephone. The Kremlin said the
talks took place in the run-up to a Russian-Turkish summit scheduled for the
near future.
A summit with Erdogan would potentially be Putin’s first
face-to-face meeting with a leader of a NATO country since the invasion, and
were it to take place in Turkey, it would also be his first trip outside the
territory of the former Soviet Union.
Europe’s dependence on Russian energy was preoccupying
policymakers and businesses as the biggest pipeline carrying Russian gas to
Germany began 10 days of annual maintenance. Governments, markets and companies
are worried the shutdown might be extended because of the war.
Putin calls the conflict, Europe’s biggest since World War
Two, a “special military operation” to demilitarise Ukraine and rid it of
dangerous nationalists. Ukraine and its Western allies say Putin’s war is an
imperial-style land grab.
Wave of Bombardments
Ukraine’s general staff said Russia had launched a wave of
bombardments as they seek to seize Donetsk. It said the widespread shelling
amounted to preparations for an intensification of hostilities.
Russia’s defence ministry said its missiles struck
ammunition depots in Ukraine’s central Dnipro region used to supply rocket
launchers and artillery weapons.
Ukraine is preparing a counter-attack in the south of the
country where Russia seized territory early in the war.
Deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk warned civilians in
the Russian-occupied Kherson region in the south on Sunday to urgently
evacuate. She gave no time frame.
- Reuters
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