Russian guided bombs tore through an apartment building in Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, on Saturday. killed three people and injured 52, including three children, officials said. Pictures posted online showed parts of the five-story apartment building in ruins, with windows broken, balconies destroyed and debris strewn around a crater on the ground. District Governor Oleg Sinegubov said four of the injured were in serious condition. “This Russian terror through guided bombs must and can be stopped,” President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Telegram. Kharkiv is located about 30 km (20 mi) from the border with Russia.
Zelensky later called for more help to deal with the growing threat of such weapons. In his overnight video address, Zelensky said Russian forces had used more than 2,400 guided bombs against Ukrainian targets in June alone, with about 700 aimed at Kharkiv. He said that after the US Congress gave delayed approval to a major aid package in April, replenished arms supplies to Ukraine had reduced the devastation and frequency of missile attacks, and the same must be done now to repel those bombs. Ukraine, he said, needs the promised military aid packages “without delay so that the agreements we reached with President Biden can be implemented.”
The governor of eastern Ukraine’s partially occupied Donetsk region said on Saturday that Russian attacks had killed five people and wounded seven the previous day. In the Russian-controlled part of the region, Moscow-appointed governor Denis Pushilin said three people were killed and four wounded in shelling by Ukrainian forces on Saturday morning. Reports could not be verified.
Ukrainian attack drones again hit Enerhodar, a town near the Russian-occupied Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, after drones earlier in the week struck two of the city’s electrical substations, a Russian-installed official said on Saturday. An employee at the station initially said it was unaffected, but Russian leadership said on Telegram on Saturday, before the latest drone strikes, that some “infrastructural facilities”, including the transport department and the printing plant, had experienced disruption following the attacks. Nuclear safeguards remain fully operational, it said.
New shelling by Russian missiles and drones damaged energy facilities in southeastern and western Ukraine on Saturday, injured at least two power workers and forced record power imports, officials said. National grid operator Ukrenergo said equipment at its facilities in the southeastern Zaporozhye region and Lviv in the west had been damaged in the second major Russian airstrike this week. The Russian strikes also affected a gas infrastructure facility in the western part of the country, the energy ministry said. Ukraine’s navy said it was the first time Russian forces had fired missiles from the Sea of Azov rather than the Black Sea. Ukraine’s air defenses intercepted 12 of the 16 missiles and all 13 drones fired by Russia, the air force said.
Russian air defense systems have destroyed 12 Ukrainian drones targeting Russia’s Bryansk region, the governor of the region, which borders Ukraine, said on Sunday. according to Reuters. According to preliminary information, there were no casualties or damage from the attack, Alexander Bogomaz, the governor of the Bryansk region, said on the Telegram messaging app.
Nigel Farage, leader of the British anti-immigration party Reform UK, has redoubled his claims that the West had provoked Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, refusing to apologize and insisting that he was not a “Putin apologist or supporter”. On Saturday Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer condemned the comments, with the prime minister saying they “played into Putin’s hands” and the Labor leader calling them “disgraceful”. In the Telegraph newspaper, Farage said: “What I’ve been saying for the last 10 years is that the West is playing into Putin’s hands.”
French prosecutors on Saturday charged two Moldovans suspected of painting coffins and a slogan calling for an end to the war in Ukraine on the facade of a prominent Paris newspaper, a judicial source said. It was the latest in a series of similar acts in the capital in recent weeks.