Ukraine urges tougher Western squeeze on Russian oil prices
The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces reported that since Friday Russia’s forces had fired five missiles, carried out 27 airstrikes and launched 44 shelling attacks against Ukraine’s military positions and civilian infrastructure.
Kyrylo Tymoshenko, the deputy head of the president’s office, said the attacks killed one civilian and wounded four others in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region.
According to the UK Defence Ministry, Russian forces “continue to invest a large element of their overall military effort and firepower” around the small Donetsk city of Bakhmut, which they have spent weeks trying to capture.
In southern Ukraine’s Kherson province, whose capital city of the same name was liberated by Ukrainian forces three weeks ago following a Russian retreat, Governor Yaroslav Yanushkevich said evacuations of civilians stuck in Russian-held territory across the Dnieper River would resume temporarily.
Russian forces pulled back to the river’s eastern bank last month.
Yanushkevich said a ban on crossing the waterway would be lifted during daylight hours for three days for Ukrainian citizens who “did not have time to leave the temporarily occupied territory”. His announcement cited a “possible intensification of hostilities in this area”.
Kherson is one of four regions that Putin illegally annexed in September and vowed to defend as Russian territory.
From their new positions, Russian troops have regularly shelled Kherson city and nearby infrastructure in recent days, leaving many residents without power. Running water remained unavailable in much of the city.
The other regions annexed in violation of international law are Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia.
Ukrainian authorities also reported intense fighting in Luhansk and Russian shelling of northeastern Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, which Russia’s soldiers mostly withdrew from in September.
The mayor of the northeastern city of Kharkiv said about 500 apartment buildings were damaged beyond repair, and nearly 220 schools and kindergartens were damaged or destroyed. He estimated the cost of the damage at US$9 billion.
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