‘WRONG ASSUMPTIONS’
Ukrainian authorities said a psychiatric hospital near the eastern town of Izyum had been hit. Emergency services said no one was hurt as the patients were already sheltering in the basement.
Kharkiv governor Oleh Synegubov called the attack a war crime. Reuters could not verify the report.
Moscow denies it has been targeting civilians in what it calls a “special operation” to disarm and “de-Nazify” Ukraine. Ukraine and its allies say this was a baseless pretext for Russia’s invasion of the democratic country of 44 million.
Three air strikes near a kindergarten in the central city of Dnipro killed at least one person on Friday, state emergency services said.
The mayor of Lutsk said four people had been killed and six wounded in an attack on an airfield – a rare strike on a target deep in western Ukraine, far from the battlefields in the north, east and south.
In Kharkiv, hundreds of people were sheltering in metro stations. Nastya, a young girl lying on a makeshift bed on the floor of a train carriage, said she had been there for more than a week, unable to move around much and ill with a virus.
“I’m scared for my home, for the homes of my friends, very scared for the whole country, and scared for myself of course,” she said.
Moscow said its separatist allies in the southeast had captured the town of Volnovakha, north of Mariupol.
But Mathieu Boulegue, an expert at London’s Chatham House think tank, said Moscow might not have sufficient troops to achieve its goals.
“You can’t invade a country on a one-on-one ratio (of troops). Nobody has done it, which means that either something was wrong or they had very wrong assumptions moving into this war,” he told Reuters.
Ukraine also raised the prospect of Moscow’s ally Belarus throwing its troops into the war, accusing Russia of staging “false flag” air attacks on Belarus from Ukraine to provide an excuse for an offensive.
Belarus has served as a staging post for Russian forces both before and after the Feb. 24 invasion. The Kremlin did not respond to a request for comment.
Putin and Lukashenko agreed on Friday that Moscow would supply its smaller neighbour with up-to-date military equipment and on mutual support against Western sanctions, including on energy prices, the official Belarus Belta news agency said.
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