Russia steps up strikes on key Ukrainian cities

Gulf Today Report

Russia's forces kept up a barrage of attacks along the front concentrated in two Ukrainian cities in the eastern Donetsk region, Ukraine's military reported, as Kyiv said it repelled more than 40 enemy strikes over the past 24 hours.

Fighting was heaviest along the western approaches to Bakhmut, the general staff of Ukraine's armed forces said on Sunday, one of the two cities in the east, along with Avdiivka, that Russia's military has been targeting.

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Weekend shelling by Russian forces killed at least seven civilians, Ukrainian officials reported Sunday as Pope Francis and Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby used their traditional Easter messages to highlight the war in Ukraine and other conflicts around the world.

While Russia continued to concentrate on seizing all of Ukraine’s industrial east, two other provinces — Kharkiv in the northeast and Zaporizhzhia in the southeast — came under missile, rocket and artillery fire, the Ukrainian military reported. The governor of the Kherson region, Oleksandr Prokudin, said two communities there were hit by bombs from warplanes late Sunday, but he did not immediately report any casualties.

A soldier fires a mortar round at a front line position near Bakhmut in the Donetsk region, on Sunday. AFP

Russian forces have been besieging Bakhmut for months in the longest battle in more than a year of war.

In a nightly weekend video address, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced Russian air strikes coinciding with the observance of Orthodox Palm on Sunday, saying Moscow was further isolating itself from the world.

Kharkiv governor Oleh Syniehubov said two men died Sunday in shelling in Kupiansk, a city that Russia held before Ukrainian forces regained control of almost all of the province.

The city remained under attack later Sunday as Russian forces targeted residential areas with multiple rocket launchers, Syniehubov said. Elsewhere in the province, a 30-year-old man was hospitalized in serious condition after Russian shelling of the city of Chuhuiv, he said on Telegram.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks in Kyiv. File photo

A 50-year-old man and his 11-year-old daughter were killed after Russian missiles struck a house in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, officials said on Sunday.

It was the latest Russian attack on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine as Moscow's invasion stretches into its second year.

"The enemy carried out a missile attack on Zaporizhzhia and killed another Ukrainian family," the head of the State Emergency Service, Sergiy Kruk, said on social media.

The girl died in an ambulance, said the head of Zaporizhzhia City Council, Anatoliy Kurtiev.

Russian missiles struck a house in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia.

Rescue workers pulled the girl's 46-year-old mother alive from under the rubble.

Her elder daughter was not at home when the Russians struck at night, the emergency service said.

Shelling also killed two people overnight, one of them a child born in 2012, in the city of Zaporizhzhia, the capital of that province, City Council Secretary Anatoliy Kurtev said.

The Zaporizhzhia region's governor, Yurii Malashko, said 18 communities in all were shelled. Three people were killed and five were wounded on Saturday, Malashko said.

Zaporizhzhia is home to Europe's largest nuclear power plant and one of four Ukrainian provinces that Russian President Vladimir Putin illegally annexed in September. Since then, Russia's military has sought to oust Ukraine's troops from those areas, especially Luhansk and Donetsk provinces, which make up the industrial region known as the Donbas.