KYIV: A Russian strike killed at least five people, including a baby, and wounded 18 others in Ukraine’s Black Sea city of Odessa on Saturday, Kyiv said, warning the toll would likely rise.
“Five Ukrainians killed and 18 wounded. And those are only the ones that we were able to find. It is likely that the death toll will be heavy,” the head of Ukraine’s presidential office Andriy Yermak said on Telegram. “A three-month-old baby was among those killed.”
Earlier on Saturday, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said: “The only aim of Russian missile strikes on Odessa is terror.”
Ukraine’s air force said its defence systems intercepted two Russian TU-95 missiles that it said were fired from the Caspian Sea.
But it said four other missiles hit the city, including civilian infrastructure.
“Unfortunately, two missiles hit a military facility and two hit residential buildings,” the air force’s southern command said on Facebook.
Odessa, a largely Russian-speaking city and cultural hub, has been targeted previously by Moscow’s forces which were rebuffed by Ukraine.
Meanwhile, ‘fierce battles’ raged in eastern Ukraine on Saturday all but killing hopes of an Easter truce as officials said they would make a fresh attempt to evacuate civilians from the war-torn city of Mariupol.
The war enters its third month on Sunday with civilians continuing to pay a heavy price amid the ongoing fighting.
Authorities in two eastern Ukrainian regions — Kharkiv and Lugansk — said fighting with Russian forces raged on Saturday.
The governor of the eastern Kharkiv region, Oleg Sinegubov, said on Telegram that Ukrainian forces retook three villages near the Russian border after “fierce battles”.
Sinegubov added that Russian forces had also attacked residential infrastructure, killing two people.
In nearby Lugansk, governor Sergiy Gaiday said shelling was “round the clock”.
He called on people near the front to “evacuate if you have the chance”, saying volunteers were helping people leave the area.
Nearly 5.2 million Ukrainians have fled the country of 37 million since Russia’s attacked in late February, the UN refugee agency said on Saturday.
The fighting in the east came a day after a senior Russian military officer said “the second phase of the special operation” had begun, with the aim of controlling a huge, strategic part of Ukrainian territory.
“One of the tasks of the Russian army is to establish full control over the Donbas and southern Ukraine,” Major General Rustam Minnekaev said on Friday.
Russian forces, which withdrew from around Kyiv and the north of Ukraine after being frustrated in their attempts to take the capital, already occupy much of the eastern Donbas region and the south.
Minnekaev said their focus was now to “provide a land corridor to Crimea,” which Russia annexed in 2014, and towards a breakaway pro-Russian region of Moldova, Transnistria, where the general claimed Russian-speaking people were “being oppressed”.
Ukrainian authorities have vowed to fight on and drive the Russian troops from their land, but they also sought an Easter pause. “Unfortunately, Russia rejected the proposal to establish an Easter truce,” said President Volodymyr Zelensky earlier this week. – AFP
