Nine Civilians Claimed Killed in Russian Shelling in Eastern Ukraine

Manas Dasgupta

NEW DELHI, May 3: At least nine civilians are reported killed in Russian shelling in Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine while a Russian missile attack struck the Black Sea port of Odesa as Russia continued pounding Ukraine with no indication of an early end to the war.

The regional governor of Donetsk Pavlo Kyrylenko has confirmed the civilian deaths by firing by Russian forces on Tuesday. Taking to messaging app Telegram, governor wrote in details about the killings. He said three civilians were killed during an aerial bombardment of Avdiivka town, while another three died due to shelling in Vuhledar city.  Three more civilian deaths were reported from the town of Lyman due to shelling, he said.

The Russian defence ministry claimed that the Russian high-precision missiles have hit a logistics centre located at a military airfield near Ukraine’s Odesa which was used to deliver weaponry given to Kiev by the West. “Hangars containing unmanned Bayraktar TB2 drones, as well as missile weapons and ammunition from the U.S. and European countries, were destroyed,” the statement said. On Monday, evening governor of Odesa Maksym Marchenko said on Telegram that a rocket strike had hit the Black Sea port city on Monday evening, causing deaths and injuries.

Earlier in the day, the office of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said several areas of Donetsk were under constant fire and regional authorities were trying to evacuate civilians from frontline zones.

Russia has continued to deny targeting civilians.

Russia launched a new offensive in eastern Ukraine focused on the Donetsk and Luhansk regions after abandoning an assault on the capital Kyiv at the end of March. Parts of the two regions were already held by Moscow-backed separatists before Russia invaded its east European neighbour on February 24.

A senior U.S. official said his government believed that Russia was planning this month to annex large portions of eastern Ukraine and recognize the southern city of Kherson as an independent republic while the British military said it believed that the Russian military was now “significantly weaker” after suffering losses in its war on Ukraine.

The British Defence Ministry made the comment Tuesday in its daily statement on Twitter regarding the war. It said: “Russia’s military is now significantly weaker, both materially and conceptually, as a result of its invasion of Ukraine. Recovery from this will be exacerbated by sanctions. This will have a lasting impact on Russia’s ability to deploy conventional military force.”

The ministry added while Russia’s defence budget has doubled from 2005 to 2018, the modernization program it undertook “has not enabled Russia to dominate Ukraine.” “Failures both in strategic planning and operational execution have left it unable to translate numerical strength into decisive advantage,” the ministry said. The British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in a message before his address to Ukrainian Parliament on Tuesday said the fight against Russian invasion was Ukraine’s “finest hour.”

Even as Pope Francis said on Tuesday that he asked for a meeting in Moscow with Russian President Vladimir Putin to try to stop the war in Ukraine, the mayor of Mariupol Vadym Boychenko said more than 200 civilians were still holed up with fighters in a huge steel plant in the southern Ukrainian port city. He said a total of about 100,000 civilians were still in the southern Ukrainian city that has been occupied by Russian forces.

More than one million people, including nearly 200,000 children, have been taken from Ukraine to Russia in the past two months, Russia’s Defence Ministry said Monday. The Ministry official Mikhail Mizintsev said those included 11,550 people, including 1,847 children, in the previous 24 hours, “without the participation of the Ukrainian authorities.” He said those civilians “were evacuated to the territory of the Russian Federation from the dangerous regions” of Donetsk, Lugansk and other parts of Ukraine, according to the report. No details were provided on the location or circumstances of the moves.

Pope said he had not yet received a reply to his request for a meeting with Putin. Francis, who made an unprecedented visit to the Russian embassy when the war started, said about three weeks into the conflict, he asked the Vatican’s top diplomat to send a message to Putin. He said the message was “that I was willing to go to Moscow. Certainly, it was necessary for the Kremlin leader to allow an opening. We have not yet received a response and we are still insisting”

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s ambassador-designate to Canada Yulia Kovaliv accused the Russian troops of committing sex crimes including against children and demanded that Moscow should be held accountable for it. She told a Canadian House of Commons committee that Russia was using sexual violence as a weapon of war and said rape and sexual assault must be investigated as war crimes.

She said Russia also has kidnapped Ukrainian children and taken them to Russian-occupied territories and now Russia itself. Ukraine was working with partners to find the children and bring them back. “Russians, a few days ago, killed a young mother and taped her living child to her body and attached a mine between them,″ the ambassador said. She said the mine detonated. All of Russian society, and not just President Vladimir Putin “and his proxies,” should bear responsibility for the war on Ukraine because more than 70% of Russians support the invasion, Kovaliv said.