Kyiv, Ukraine –
Russia has targeted Western military supplies to the Ukrainian government with early air strikes in Kyiv on Sunday, destroying tanks donated from abroad as President Vladimir Putin warned that any Western supplies of long-range missile systems to Ukraine would spur Moscow to hit “objects we haven’t hit yet.”
The mysterious threat of military escalation by the Russian leader does not specify what the new targets could be, but comes days after the United States announced plans to provide $ 700 million in security aid to Ukraine, which includes four precision-guided, medium-missile systems, helicopters , Javelin anti-tank weapon systems, radars, tactical vehicles, spare parts, etc.
Military analysts say Russia hopes to conquer the hostile eastern Donbass, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting the Ukrainian government for years before any weapons could backfire. The Pentagon said earlier this week that it would take at least three weeks to bring US precision weapons and trained troops to the battlefield.
Russian forces struck at railway facilities and other infrastructure early Sunday in Kyiv, where there had been weeks of ominous calm. Ukraine’s nuclear power plant Energoatom said a cruise missile struck the Yuzhnoukrainsk nuclear power plant, about 350 kilometers (220 miles) south, on its way to the capital, citing the dangers of such a leak.
There was no immediate confirmation from Ukraine that Russian air strikes had destroyed tanks.
Kyiv has not faced such strikes since UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres visited on April 28th. The early morning attack sparked air raids and showed that Russia still has the ability and desire to strike the heart of Ukraine after abandoning its wider offensive across the country to focus its efforts on the east.
In a publication in the Telegram application, the Russian Ministry of Defense said that high-precision long-range missiles were used. It says the strikes on the outskirts of Kyiv destroyed T-72 tanks delivered from Eastern European countries and other armored vehicles housed in car repair shops.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24 resulted in countless tens of thousands of civilian and military deaths, drove millions from their homes, sparked huge sanctions against Putin’s government and allies, and stifled exports of critical wheat and other cereals from Ukraine across the Black Sea. ports – restricting access to bread and other products in Africa, the Middle East and beyond.
In a televised interview Sunday, Putin criticized Western arms supplies to Ukraine, saying they were aimed at prolonging the conflict.
“All this turmoil over additional arms supplies, I think, has only one goal: to prolong the armed conflict as much as possible,” Putin said, alluding to US plans to supply multiple rocket launchers to Kyiv. He insisted that such supplies were unlikely to change much for the Ukrainian government, which he said simply offset losses from missiles with a similar range that they already had.
If Kyiv receives longer-range missiles, he added, Moscow will “draw the appropriate conclusions and use our abundant means of destruction, which we have in abundance, to strike at those targets that we have not yet struck.”
The missiles hit Kiev’s Darnytskyi and Dniprovskyi districts, Mayor Vitali Klitschko told the Telegram news agency, stressing the Kremlin’s recently reduced goal of capturing the entire Donbass. Moscow-backed separatists fought Ukrainian forces for eight years in Donbass and created self-proclaimed republics.
In recent days, Russian forces have focused on capturing the city of Severodonetsk.
Rising pillars of smoke filled the air with a pungent odor in Kyiv’s eastern Darnytskyi district, and the charred, blackened remnants of a warehouse-type structure were smoldering. Police near the scene told an Associated Press reporter that military authorities had banned the photos. Soldiers also blocked a road in a nearby area leading to a large railway park.
The hit sites include facilities for the state railway company Ukrzaliznytsia, Sergei Leshchenko, an adviser in the office of President Vladimir Zelensky, told Telegram. The cruise missiles appear to have been fired by a Tu-95 bomber flying over the Caspian Sea, the Air Force Command said on Facebook. It says air defense units shot down a missile.
Energoatom said a cruise missile had come dangerously close to the Yuzhnoukrainsk nuclear power plant. It says the missile “flew critically low” and that Russian forces “still do not understand that even the smallest fragment of a missile that could hit a working power unit could cause a nuclear accident and a radiation leak.” .
Elsewhere, Russian forces continued to seize land in eastern Ukraine with missile and air strikes on towns and villages in the Luhansk region, with the war already exceeding the 100-day mark.
Luhansk Governor Sergei Haidai told the Telegram that “air strikes by Russian Ka-52 helicopters were carried out in the Girske and Mirna Dolina areas, by Su-25 planes in Ustinovka,” while Lisichansk was hit by a missile from Tochka. U. complex.
A total of 13 houses were damaged in Girske and five in Lisichansk. Another air strike was announced in the eastern city of Kramatorsk by its mayor, Alexander Goncharenko. No one was killed in the attack, he said, but two businesses in the city suffered “significant damage”.
On Sunday morning, the General Staff of Ukraine accused Russian forces of using phosphate munitions in the village of Cherkasy Tishki in the Kharkiv region. The claim cannot be verified independently.
The update also confirmed the strikes against Kyiv in the early hours of Sunday. It was not immediately clear from the statement which infrastructure facilities in Kyiv were affected.
The General Staff said Russian forces were continuing the assault operations in Severodonetsk, one of the two key cities left to be captured in Luhansk, Donbass. The Russians control the eastern part of the city, the update said, focusing on attempts to encircle Ukrainian forces in the area and “block major logistics routes.”
The British military said in its daily intelligence update that Ukraine’s counterattacks in Severodonetsk “probably dull the operational momentum of Russian forces, previously gained by concentrating combat units and firepower.” Russian forces have previously made a series of advances in the city, but Ukrainian fighters have withdrawn in recent days.
The statement also said that the Russian military relied in part on separatist reserve forces in the Luhansk region.
“These troops are poorly equipped and trained and lack heavy equipment compared to regular Russian units,” the intelligence update said, adding that “this approach probably shows a desire to limit the casualties suffered by regular Russian forces.”
Away from the battlefield, Ukraine’s national footballers are hoping to secure a place in the World Cup when the team faces Wales later Sunday in Cardiff.
On the diplomatic front, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is leaving for Serbia for talks with President Alexander Vucic earlier this week, followed by a visit to Turkey on Tuesday, where the Russian envoy is expected to discuss Ukraine with his Turkish counterpart.
Turkey is trying to work with the UN and warring parties to help clear the way for Ukrainian grain exports to Turkish ports, although a deal on the issue did not seem inevitable.
An adviser to the Ukrainian president called on European nations to respond with “more sanctions, more weapons” to Sunday’s rocket attacks.
Mikhail Podoliak referred to remarks Friday by French President Emmanuel Macron, who said Putin had made a “historic mistake” in invading Ukraine, but that world powers should not “humiliate Russia” in order to find a diplomatic solution. when the fighting stops.
Ukrainian authorities say Ukraine and Russia exchanged the bodies of slain soldiers this week, the first officially confirmed exchange. Ukraine’s Ministry of Reintegration of the Occupied Territories said each country exchanged 160 bodies on Saturday on the front line in the southern Zaporozhye region, parts of which are under Russian control. Russian authorities have not commented on the exchange.
In the Vatican, Pope Francis made one of his strongest calls for a ceasefire and peace talks in Ukraine, urging leaders: “Do not destroy the world, please. Don’t destroy the world. ” He made the request during his traditional Sunday blessing from a window overlooking St. Peter’s Square, asking leaders to hear “the desperate cries of people who are suffering” more than 100 days after the Russian invasion.
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