Kyiv, Ukraine –
Russia on Monday unleashed a series of attacks on railway and fuel installations deep in Ukraine, far from the front line of Moscow’s new eastern offensive, in a bid to thwart Ukraine’s efforts to organize supplies for the battle.
Meanwhile, the United States has called for more weapons against Ukraine, saying aid from Western allies makes a difference in the two-month war.
“Russia is failing. Ukraine is succeeding, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said a day after he and the US Secretary of Defense made a bold visit to Kyiv to meet with President Vladimir Zelensky.
Blinken said Washington has approved $ 165 million worth of ammunition sales – ammunition outside the United States, mostly if not entirely for Soviet-era weapons – and will also provide more than $ 300 million in funding to buy more supplies. .
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin continued his comments, saying that while the US wants to see Ukraine remain a sovereign, democratic country, they also want to “see Russia weakened to the point where it cannot do things like invading Ukraine. “.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has accused the United States and its allies of trying to “split Russian society and destroy Russia from within.”
Other events have reported fires at two oil rigs in western Russia, not far from the Ukrainian border. Their cause was not immediately known.
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th, its obvious goal was the swift conquest of Kyiv, the capital. But Ukrainians, using Western weapons, are thwarting the pressure and forcing Putin’s troops to retreat.
Moscow now says its goal is to take over Donbass, a predominantly Russian-speaking industrial region in eastern Ukraine. While both sides say the campaign in the east is under way, Russia has not yet launched a full-scale ground offensive and has not made major breakthroughs.
On Monday, Russia focused its firepower elsewhere, with missiles and fighter jets striking far behind the front lines.
Five stations in central and western Ukraine have been hit and one worker killed, said Alexander Kamishin, head of Ukraine’s state railway. The bombing involved a rocket attack near Lviv, a western city near the Polish border that was swollen by Ukrainians fleeing fighting elsewhere in the country.
Ukrainian authorities say at least five people have been killed in Russian strikes in the central Vinnytsia region.
Russia has also destroyed an oil refinery in Kremenchuk, central Ukraine, along with fuel depots there, said Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov. In all, Russian warplanes destroyed 56 Ukrainian targets overnight, he said.
Philip Breedlove, a retired U.S. general who served as NATO’s commander-in-chief from 2013 to 2016, said the latest strikes on fuel depots are part of a strategy to drain key Ukrainian military resources. Strikes on rail targets, on the other hand, are a newer tactic, he said.
“I think they are doing it for the legitimate reason of trying to block the flow of supplies to the front,” he said. “The illegal reason is that they know that people are trying to leave the country, and this is just another intimidating, terrorist tactic that will make them lack faith and confidence in traveling on rails.
Phillips P. O’Brien, a professor of strategic research at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, said the war was turning into a campaign of growing losses and gains on the battlefield.
“The two sides seem to be weakening each other every day,” he said. “So the question is what can you bring in, what’s new” and “what can you destroy on the other side.”
In Transnistria, a breakaway region of Moldova, several explosions believed to have been caused by rocket-propelled grenades hit the territory’s Ministry of State Security. There was no immediate accountability and no injuries were reported immediately.
Transnistria is a strip of land with about 470,000 people on the Ukrainian border. Russia has about 1,500 troops based there.
The Moldovan Foreign Ministry said that “the purpose of today’s incident is to create pretexts to tighten the security situation in the Transnistrian region.” Earlier, the United States warned that Russia could launch attacks under a “false flag” against its own country to create a pretext for invading other nations.
Last week, Rustam Minekayev, a Russian military commander, said the Kremlin wanted full control of southern Ukraine, which he said would pave the way for Transnistria.
Approximately 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers, hiding in a steel plant in the strategic southern port city of Mariupol, are tying up Russian forces and apparently preventing them from adding to the offensive elsewhere in Donbass. Over the weekend, Russian forces launched new air strikes on the Azovstal plant to try to displace detainees.
About 1,000 civilians are also said to be sheltering at the steel plant, and the Russian military has promised to open a humanitarian corridor on Monday to leave.
Russia’s proposal has been met with skepticism from Ukraine. Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk told the Telegram news agency that Ukraine did not consider the route safe and added that Russia had violated agreements on similar evacuation routes before. She called on the United Nations to monitor the evacuation.
The city council and the mayor of Mariupol said a new mass grave had been discovered about 10km (6 miles) north of the city. Mayor Vadim Boychenko said authorities were trying to calculate the number of victims. Satellite images published over the past few days have yielded what looked like images of other mass graves.
Mariupol has been eradicated by bombing and fierce street fighting over the past two months. In addition to liberating Russian troops, the capture of the city will deprive Ukraine of a vital port and allow Moscow to build a land corridor to the Crimean peninsula, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014.
Britain has said it believes 15,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine since Moscow launched its invasion. Defense Minister Ben Wallace said that 25% of Russian combat units sent to Ukraine “have become ineffective in the fight.”
Ukrainian authorities say about 2,500 to 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers were killed in mid-April.
Meanwhile, fires broke out at two oil depots in Bryansk, western Russia, about 100km (60 miles) from the Ukrainian border. One of the fires is in a depot owned by a subsidiary of the Russian state-owned company Transneft, Russian authorities said.
Last month, Russia accused two Ukrainian helicopters of hitting an oil depot in Russia’s Belgorod region near the Ukrainian border.
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Associated Press journalists Juras Karmanau and John Gambrell of Lviv, Ukraine, and AP officials around the world.
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