Rescue teams scoured the rubble of a residential building in the eastern Ukrainian city of Tchasiv Yar on Sunday, after an attack that local authorities blamed on Russia left at least 15 people dead and more than 20 missing in the city. last night.
The municipality is located in Donetsk province, where attacks intensified after Moscow conquered the neighboring Lugansk region. Together, the two areas, with a mostly ethnic Russian population, form the portion of Ukrainian territory known as the Donbass.
The region served as one of the arguments put forward by Vladimir Putin to invade neighboring territory. The Russian leader said that Kiev was practicing a policy of genocide in the area, where there are also two self-proclaimed breakaway republics that Putin recognized days before starting the military action.
Andrii Yermak, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, characterized the attack on Tchasiv Iar as “another terrorist attack” by Moscow in a text on the messaging app Telegram and said that Russia should be titled as a state sponsoring terrorism. request already made by Zelensky to the UN.
Meanwhile, Russia said its forces attacked Ukrainian army depots storing US-made M777 howitzers near Kostiantinivka, a city also located in Donetsk. The information cannot be independently confirmed.
Zelenski thanked again, on Saturday (9), for the military aid sent by Washington during a video speech that he makes every night. He also again called for the dispatch of modern, high-precision weapons. “It’s the only way to really stop these terrorist actions,” he said.
The Ukrainian leader said that Russian artillery attacks in the Donbass have hit cities such as Sloviansk, Bakhmut and Avdiivka on a daily basis. According to the most recent report by the American think tank Institute for the Study of War (ISW), Moscow has carried out a series of unsuccessful attacks on Sloviansk from Lisitchansk, a city taken in Lugansk.
In large part, the difficulty of completely controlling Donbass, says the ISW, would be in the shortage of soldiers and equipment, which led the country to place old armored vehicles at the front and launch new campaigns to recruit civilians.
Attacks are also intensifying in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city to the north of Donbass. Ukrainian officials estimate that the Russians control about 30% of the region. Volunteers were cleaning up the wreckage of a school that was hit Sunday morning by missiles, but which was empty at the time.
The eventual conquest of Kharkiv and Donetsk would allow Moscow to dominate a swath of northwest and south Ukraine, all the way to the city of Kherson, the first city to be taken since the beginning of the invasion.
