(Kiev) Two people were killed and five wounded in a Russian bomb attack targeting the Kherson region in southern Ukraine, its governor Yaroslav Yanushevich said on Sunday.
In November the city of Kherson was recaptured by Ukrainian forces in a counter-offensive, which led to the withdrawal of Russian forces across the left bank of the Dnieper River.
“The enemy has again attacked the residential areas of Kherson,” the governor said in his Telegram account, adding that the Russian army attacked a maternity ward, a cafe and apartment buildings.
“Last night, two people were killed by Russian shelling,” the governor said, adding that “almost 90%” of power had been restored in the city and its environs.
Five others were wounded to varying degrees in “45 attacks” targeting the area with artillery, multiple rocket launchers, tanks and mortars, he said.
Before their withdrawal in November, Russian forces destroyed the city’s basic utility infrastructure and then repeatedly shelled Kherson.
In the Black Sea city of Odessa, an emergency power outage continues following Russian drone strikes, regional government spokesman Sergey Bratchuk said on Sunday.
STRINGER PHOTO, REUTERS
Apartment buildings were without power during the blackout after Russian drone strikes in Odessa damaged critical civilian infrastructure.
Officials also said there were “interruptions in water supply” due to power outages in some parts of the city.
On Sunday, Odessa Region Governor Maksym Marchenko said power was “gradually” restored in Odessa, but 300,000 people remained without power.
On Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said more than 1.5 million people were without electricity in the Odesa region after a Russian attack using Iranian drones.
Odessa was a popular vacation spot for many Ukrainians and Russians before Russian troops invaded Ukraine on February 24.
Russian forces have targeted key infrastructure in southern Ukraine using “significantly greater numbers of Iranian-made drones than in previous weeks,” the Institute for Combat Research, a US-based defense think tank, noted on Saturday.
According to the expert panel, this could indicate that “Russia has recently received or expects to receive new drone deliveries from Iran.”
Iran has been accused by the West of supplying drones to Russia, allegations Moscow has denied.
Arms production is accelerating
Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president and current No. 2 in the Security Council, said on Sunday that Moscow was preparing “the most powerful means of destruction” based on “new principles” and threatening to use them “against the West.”
“Our enemy has not established himself only in the Kiev government (administrative territorial agency of Imperial Russia, editor’s note) […] “He is in Europe, North America, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and other places that have pledged allegiance to the Nazis of our time,” Medvedev wrote.
“This is why we are intensifying the production of more powerful means of destruction, including those based on new principles,” he continued in a message posted Sunday morning on his Telegram account.
He did not elaborate on these new policies, but specifically referred to a new generation of hypersonic weapons that Moscow boasts of developing aggressively in recent years.
The threat of nuclear war returned after the attack in Ukraine in February, underscoring the erosion of the global security framework since the Cold War.
Russian military setbacks in recent months have raised fears that Moscow is considering using its nuclear arsenal to reverse course.
This week, Russian President Vladimir Putin put the risk of such aid into perspective by insisting that the weapons were “defense mechanisms” aimed at a “retaliatory attack.”
On Friday, he also raised the possibility of Russia changing its military doctrine by introducing the possibility of a preemptive strike to disarm the enemy.
The U.S. State Department condemned these recent statements, saying, “Any discussion of nuclear weapons, however vague, is completely irresponsible. »
Ukrainian attack on Melitopol
Ukrainian forces launched an attack on the Russian-occupied city of Melitopol (southern Ukraine) on Saturday evening, pro-Russian official sources and people loyal to Kiev said.
The strategic city, which before the war had a population of more than 150,000, is located in the region of Zaporizhia, which Moscow claims to have annexed.
Both sides gave conflicting information about the targets of the strikes and casualties, which AFP could not immediately verify.
According to Yevgeny Balitsky, the Russian-appointed head of the Zaporizhia region, Ukrainian forces attacked Melitopol around 9 p.m. Saturday using US HIMARS long-range rockets.
The attack destroyed an “entertainment center” on the outskirts of the city, killing two people and injuring ten others. He said he reached the spot when people were eating.
Two rockets were destroyed in flight and four rockets hit their target, the official added.
Another pro-Russian regional official, Vladimir Rokov, posted a photo of a large fire destroying an “entertainment center.”
Ivan Fedorov, the mayor of the town he fled to against the Russians, said Ukrainian forces had stormed the town and killed dozens of “invaders”.
No comment was immediately available from the Ukrainian military.
HIMARS rocket launchers played a key role in the Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russian forces in southern and eastern Ukraine.
Russian troops captured Melitopol at the beginning of the offensive launched on February 24.
