Five people were injured in kyiv after Russia launched a new wave of drone and missile strikes on Ukraine in the early hours of Monday. Two of them were injured when the wreckage of a drone fell on a two-story building in the west of the city, while drone debris also fell on the runway of Zhuliany airport from the city..
Explosions were also reported in the Black Sea city of Odessa, where Serhiy Bratchuk, spokesman for Odessa’s military administration, said a food warehouse and recreation area were set on fire.. Other Russian strikes were also reported in Zaporizhzhia and the southern region of Kherson.
Russian Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin appears to have abandoned plans to pull out of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, saying Moscow promised him more weapons. The Ukrainian general in charge of defending the besieged city said on Sunday night that Russia had stepped up bombardment and hoped to take Bakhmut by Tuesday, VE Day, the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat in the Second World War. Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi vowed to do everything he could to prevent it.
Prigozhin and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov ‘probably blackmailed’ Russia’s Defense Ministry into allocating more resources to Wagner, said the Institute for the Study of War in its latest assessment of the conflict. Kadyrov was happy to help Prigozhin to restore his position in the circle of power in the Kremlin, he argued.
A total of 1,679 people, including 660 children, were evacuated from areas near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plantsaid a Moscow-based official in the Russian-controlled parts of the Zaporizhzhia region. The head of the UN’s nuclear energy watchdog, Rafael Grossi, has warned that the situation around the plant has become “potentially dangerous”, with Ukraine set to launch a long-awaited counter-offensive to resume soon the territory under Russian control, including in the Zaporizhzhia region.
Nine Ukrainian explosives experts who were involved in mine clearance were killed in a single Russian attack in the southern Kherson region on Saturdaysaid Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in his last evening speech.
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has threatened death in prison for anyone found guilty of Saturday’s attack on nationalist writer Zakhar Prilepin. Writing on Telegram, Medvedev, who is now deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, said any suspects, “like other criminals, will be tried for the attack and sentenced to long prison terms.” Prilepin, who was injured in a car explosion on Saturday, has been brought out of a medically induced coma, according to local officials.
Five people were injured in a strike on the town of Balakliia, local authorities said. Oleg Synegubov, the governor of the eastern Kharkiv region, said on Telegram that a missile landed near a parking lot on Sunday.
Sixteen settlements in the Zaporizhzhia region were hit by a total of 75 strikes over the past dayaccording to the local military administration.
A 72-year-old woman was killed and two people injured in shelling in the southern Dnipro regionlocal officials said.
The number of Russian soldiers killed or wounded since the start of the war stands at 193,430according to the latest estimates of the Ukrainian army.
Russia’s population has shrunk by 2 million more than expected over the past three years due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraineaccording to British intelligence.