Russian attacks kill 10 in Ukraine as deportations continue | War in Ukraine
Bombing killed at least five people in Mykolaiv, southern Ukraine.
New Russian artillery barrages killed at least five people in the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv, bringing the toll to at least ten dead and nearly two dozen wounded over the past day due to Russian attacks across the country.
While Mykolaiv has been the target of repeated Russian attacks over the past few days, invading missiles also hit Zaporizhia on Wednesday. These strikes could signal Moscow's intention to hang on to retain some southern Ukrainian territory as it fights to conquer all of the country's east. The Ukrainians, however, are increasing their efforts to recover some of the lost areas in the south.
As the fighting raged, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused Russia of committing another war crime by forcing hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men, women and children into deportation to the sole purpose of destabilizing the country's demographics.
Some of the civilian deaths occurred in Donetsk province, which is part of an area where pro-Russian separatists have beaten for eight years and whom the Kremlin intends to capture. The city of Bakhmout suffered particularly heavy shelling, said the administrative head of Donetsk, Pavlo Kyrylenko.
In adjacent Luhansk province, which Russian and separatist forces have all but conquered, Ukrainian soldiers have fought to retain control of two outlying villages amid shelling, Governor Serhiy Haidai said .
Luhansk and Donetsk together form Ukraine's Donbass region, a predominantly Russian-speaking region of steelworks, mines, and other industries vital to the economy. The Russians are deliberately burning Donbass and there will be no one left in the captured territories, Haidai said.
Russian artillery also downed on northeast Ukraine, where a regional governor, Oleg Syniehubov, accused Russian forces of trying to terrorize civilians in Kharkiv, the country's second largest city.
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Antony Blinken strongly condemned the practices of the Russian military. which illegally deports protected persons from Ukrainian territories under Russian control, he argued.
Russian authorities must release these detainees and allow forcibly displaced Ukrainian citizens or forced to leave their country to return home quickly and safely, the secretary of state said in a statement.
According to Blinken, an estimated 900,000 to 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens – including 260,000 children – were interrogated, detained and then deported to Russia in various locations, including in the far east. /p>
The Secretary of State cited mounting evidence that Russian authorities are detaining, torturing, or disappearing Ukrainian civilians deemed to be threats because of their ties to the military, media, government, or civilians. civil society groups. Some testimonies even report summary executions.
As Russia aimed east, the Ukrainian army attempted to recover captured towns in the south. Ukraine's military claimed on Tuesday that it used missiles to destroy a Russian ammunition depot in Nova Kakhovka, a town the Russians are occupying east of the Black Sea port of Kherson.
< p class="e-p">The accuracy of the strike against this depot suggests that Ukrainian forces used US-supplied High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, a type of weapon that the Kyiv government has claimed repeatedly.
Russian news agency TASS instead explained that the explosion occurred at a storage facility. mineral fertilizers. Some of the fertilizer ingredients can be used for ammo.
Separately, the United Nations said it made progress on Wednesday following the first face-to-face talks in months between Russian and Ukrainian officials to allow millions of tonnes of grain stuck in Ukraine to be shipped to Ukraine. reason for the Russian invasion.
The plan proposed by the UN aims to allow Ukrainian grain to be released on the world market in addition to allowing Russia to also sell its grain and fertilizers.
As a result of the conflict, about 22 million tons of grain are stuck in Ukraine. The authorities are looking for a solution to empty the silos in time to welcome the new harvests. Some of the stocks are shipped to Europe by rail, road or river, but this is only a small percentage compared to exports that leave via the Black Sea.
UN says Russian invasion endangers food supply in many developing states in addition to driving up food prices and threatening to aggravate famine affecting more than 181 million people.
Dressing in civilian clothes, Russian and Ukrainian representatives sat facing each other on opposite sides a large square table around which were also emissaries from the Turkish army and the UN. The meeting would have lasted 90 minutes.
