Russian missile attacks on civilian targets in retaliation to the Kerch Bridge blasts has killed dozens, wounded many more, and destroyed property worth millions of dollars in key Ukrainian cities
Russian forces showered Ukraine with more missiles and
munition-carrying drones Tuesday after widespread strikes killed at least 19
people in an attack the U.N. human rights office described as
"particularly shocking" and amounting to potential war crimes.
Air raid warnings sounded throughout Ukraine for a second
advised residents to conserve energy and stock up on water. The strikes
have knocked out power across the country and pierced the relative calm that
had returned to Kyiv and many other cities far from the war's front lines.
"It brings anger, not fear," Kyiv resident
Volodymyr Vasylenko, 67, said as crews worked to restore traffic lights and
clear debris from the capital's streets. "We already got used to this. And
we will keep fighting."
The leaders of the Group of Seven industrial powers
condemned the bombardment and said they would "stand firmly with Ukraine
for as long as it takes." Their pledge defied Russian warnings that
the war and the pain of Ukraine's people.
Russian retaliation
Russia launched the widespread attacks in retaliation for a
weekend explosion that damaged the Kerch Bridge between Russia and the Crimean
Peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014. Russian President Vladimir Putin
alleged that Ukrainian special services masterminded the blast. The Ukrainian
government has applauded it but not claimed responsibility.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the G-7 leaders
during a virtual meeting that during the past two days Russia fired more than
of drones at Ukraine, and that while Ukraine shot down many of them, it
needs "more modern and effective" air defense systems.
The Pentagon earlier announced plans to deliver the first
two advanced NASAMs anti-aircraft systems to Ukraine in the coming weeks. The
systems, which Kyiv has long wanted, will provide medium- to long-range defense
against missile attacks.
In a phone call with Zelenskyy on Tuesday, President Joe
Biden "pledged to continue providing Ukraine with the support needed to
defend itself, including advanced air defense systems," the White House
said.
Air defense system
Zelenskyy thanked the U.S. and also Germany for speeding up
the delivery of the first of four promised IRIS-T air defense systems. Ukraine's
defense minister tweeted that the German system had just arrived, and that a
"new era" of air defense for Ukraine had begun.
Zelenskyy also urged the G-7 leaders to respond
"symmetrically" to the attacks on the Ukrainian energy sector by
doing more to stop Russia from profiting off its exports of oil and gas.
"Such steps can bring peace closer," he said.
"They will encourage the terrorist state to think about peace, about the
unprofitability of war."
Ukrainian officials said
the diffuse strikes on power plants and civilian areas made no
"practical military sense." However, Putin's supporters had urged the
Kremlin for weeks to take tougher action in Ukraine and criticized the Russian
military for a series of embarrassing battlefield setbacks.
Pro-Kremlin pundits lauded the attacks as an appropriate
response to Kyiv's successful counteroffensives. Many of them argued that
Moscow should keep up the intensity to win a war now in its eighth month.
The head of Britain's cyber-intelligence agency, Jeremy
Fleming, said Tuesday in a rare public speech that Russia is running out of
military supplies and struggling to fill its ranks.
‘Desperate situation’
"Russia's forces are exhausted," Fleming said.
"The use of prisoners as reinforcements, and now the mobilization of tens
of thousands of inexperienced conscripts, speaks of a desperate
situation."
Like Monday's strikes, the bombardment Tuesday struck both
energy infrastructure and civilian areas. One person was killed when 12
missiles slammed into the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, setting off a large
fire, the State Emergency Service said. A local official said the missiles hit
a school, residential buildings and medical facilities.
Energy facilities
in the western Lviv and Vinnytsia regions also took hits. Officials said
Ukrainian forces shot down an inbound Russian missile before it reached Kyiv,
but the capital region experienced rolling power outages as a result of the
previous day's strikes.
The State Emergency Service said 19 people died and 105
people were wounded in Monday's strikes. At least five of the victims were in
Kyiv, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. More than 300 cities and towns lost power.
A spokesperson for the office of the U.N. High Commissioner
for Human Rights said Tuesday that strikes on "civilian objects,"
including infrastructure such as power plants, could qualify as a war crime.
"Damage to key power stations and lines ahead of the
upcoming winter raises further concerns for the protection of civilians and in
particular the impact on vulnerable populations," Ravina Shamdasani told
reporters in Geneva. "Attacks targeting civilians and objects
indispensable to the survival of civilians are prohibited under international
humanitarian law."
War crimes investigation
War crimes investigations have long been underway in towns
where mass graves were found, along with other evidence of atrocities, after
they were liberated from Russian occupation. In Lyman, a city in the eastern
Donetsk region, forensic workers pulled several bodies from a mass grave
Tuesday, part of an arduous effort to piece together evidence of what happened
under more than four months of Russian occupation. Regional Gov. Pavlo
Kyrylenko said the bodies of 32 Ukrainian soldiers have been exhumed so far
from one mass grave.
The tempo of the war in the last month fanned concerns that
Moscow might broaden the battlefield and resort to using nuclear weapons in
Ukraine. As Ukraine's counteroffensives in the east and south
forcedRussia's troops to retreat from some areas, a cornered Kremlin ratcheted up
Cold War-era rhetoric.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Tuesday that
Moscow would only employ nuclear weapons if the Russian state faced imminent
destruction. Speaking on state TV, he accused the West of encouraging false
speculation about the Kremlin's intentions.
Russia's nuclear doctrine envisions "exclusively
retaliatory measures intended to prevent the destruction of the Russian
Federation as a result of direct nuclear strikes or the use of other weapons that
raise the threat for the very existence of the Russian state," Lavrov
said.
In Brussels, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said
the alliance would hold annual war exercises testing the state of readiness of
its nuclear capabilities next week as scheduled.
Asked whether it was the wrong time for them, Stoltenberg
replied: "It would send a very wrong signal now if we suddenly cancelled a
routine, longtime-planned exercise because of the war in Ukraine."
Stoltenberg called Putin's rhetoric "irresponsible"
but said he believes "Russia knows that a nuclear war can never be won and
must never be fought."
Kremlin warnings
NATO as an organization does not possess nuclear weapons.
They remain under the control of three member countries — the United States,
the U.K. and France.
The G-7, leaders who held the emergency
meeting in response to Monday's attack, said the "indiscriminate
attacks on innocent civilian populations constitute a war crime" and
reaffirmed their "commitment to providing the support Ukraine needs to
uphold its sovereignty and territorial integrity."
The pledge appeared to come in response to Kremlin warnings
that Western military assistance, including training Ukrainian soldiers in NATO
countries and feeding real-time satellite data to target Russian forces, increasingly
made Ukraine's allies parties to the conflict.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said continued U.S. weapons
deliveries to Ukraine would
prolongthe fighting and inflict more damage on the country without changing
Russia's objectives.
As Russian forces pounded three districts around the
Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant overnight, Ukraine's state nuclear operator
said Russian forces kidnapped the plant's deputy human resources director.
Russians previously detained the facility's general director
and released him following pressure from International Atomic Energy Agency
Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi.
Grossi met with Putin on Tuesday in St. Petersburg and urged
him to agree to a "safety and security protection zone" around the
occupied plant to prevent a radiation disaster.
(Text and
images: AP)
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