KYIV, Ukraine
Russian forces showered
Ukraine with more missiles and munition-carrying drones Tuesday after widespread
strikes killed at least 19 people in an attack the U.N. human rights
office described as “particularly shocking” and amounting to potential war
crimes.Members of a forensic team carry a plastic bag with a body inside as they work in an exhumation in a mass grave in Lyman, Ukraine, Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2022. (AP)
Air raid warnings sounded
throughout Ukraine for a
second straight morning as officials advised residents to conserve
energy and stock up on water. The strikes have knocked out power across the
country and pierced
the relative calm that had returned to Kyiv and many other cities far
from the war’s front lines.
“It brings anger, not fear,”
Kyiv resident Volodymyr Vasylenko, 67, said as crews worked to restore traffic
lights and clear debris from the capital’s streets. “We already got used to
this. And we will keep fighting.”
The leaders of the Group of
Seven industrial powers condemned the bombardment and said they would “stand
firmly with Ukraine for as long as it takes.” Their pledge defied Russian
warnings that Western assistance would prolong the war and the pain of
Ukraine’s people.
Russia launched the widespread
attacks in
retaliation for a weekend explosion that damaged the Kerch Bridge
between Russia and the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014. Russian
President Vladimir Putin alleged that Ukrainian special services masterminded
the blast. The Ukrainian government has applauded it but not claimed
responsibility.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelenskyy told the G-7 leaders during a virtual meeting that during the past
two days Russia fired more than 100 missiles and dozens of drones at Ukraine,
and that while Ukraine shot down many of them, it needs “more modern and
effective” air defense systems.
ALSO READ: "Putin 'miscalculated' Russia's ability to occupy Ukraine" - Biden
The Pentagon earlier announced
plans to deliver the first two advanced NASAMs anti-aircraft systems to Ukraine
in the coming weeks. The systems, which Kyiv has long wanted, will provide
medium- to long-range defense against missile attacks.
In a phone call with Zelenskyy
on Tuesday, President Joe Biden “pledged to continue providing Ukraine with the
support needed to defend itself, including advanced air defense systems,” the
White House said.
Zelenskyy thanked the U.S. and
also Germany for speeding up the delivery of the first of four promised IRIS-T
air defense systems. Ukraine’s defense minister tweeted that the German system
had just arrived, and that a “new era” of air defense for Ukraine had begun.
Zelenskyy also urged the G-7
leaders to respond “symmetrically” to the attacks on the Ukrainian energy
sector by doing more to stop Russia from profiting off its exports of oil and
gas.
“Such steps can bring peace
closer,” he said. “They will encourage the terrorist state to think about
peace, about the unprofitability of war.”
Ukrainian officials said the
diffuse strikes on power plants and civilian areas made no “practical military
sense.” However, Putin’s supporters had urged the Kremlin for weeks to take
tougher action in Ukraine and criticized the Russian military for a series of
embarrassing battlefield setbacks.
Pro-Kremlin pundits lauded the
attacks as an appropriate response to Kyiv’s successful counteroffensives. Many
of them argued that Moscow should keep
up the intensity to win a war now in its eighth month.
The head of Britain’s
cyber-intelligence agency, Jeremy Fleming, said Tuesday in
a rare public speech that Russia is running out of military supplies
and struggling to fill its ranks.
ALSO READ: Germany to 'quickly' send air defense systems to Ukraine
“Russia’s forces are
exhausted,” Fleming said. “The use of prisoners as reinforcements, and now the
mobilization of tens of thousands of inexperienced conscripts, speaks of a
desperate situation.”
Like Monday’s strikes, the
bombardment Tuesday struck both energy infrastructure and civilian areas. One
person was killed when 12 missiles slammed into the southern city of
Zaporizhzhia, setting off a large fire, the State Emergency Service said. A
local official said the missiles hit a school, residential buildings and
medical facilities.
Energy facilities in the
western Lviv and Vinnytsia regions also took hits. Officials said Ukrainian
forces shot down an inbound Russian missile before it reached Kyiv, but the
capital region experienced rolling power outages as a result of the previous
day’s strikes.
The State Emergency Service
said 19 people died and 105 people were wounded in Monday’s strikes. At least
five of the victims were in Kyiv, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. More than 300
cities and towns lost power.
A spokesperson for the office
of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said Tuesday that strikes on
“civilian objects,” including infrastructure such as power plants, could
qualify as a war crime.
“Damage to key power stations
and lines ahead of the upcoming winter raises further concerns for the
protection of civilians and in particular the impact on vulnerable
populations,” Ravina Shamdasani told reporters in Geneva. “Attacks targeting
civilians and objects indispensable to the survival of civilians are prohibited
under international humanitarian law.”
War crimes investigations have
long been underway in towns where mass graves were found, along with other
evidence of atrocities, after they were liberated from Russian occupation. In
Lyman, a city in the eastern Donetsk region, forensic
workers pulled several bodies from a mass grave Tuesday, part of an
arduous effort to piece together evidence of what happened under more than four
months of Russian occupation. Regional Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said the bodies of
32 Ukrainian soldiers have been exhumed so far from one mass grave.
The tempo of the war in the
last month fanned concerns that Moscow might broaden the battlefield and resort
to using nuclear weapons in Ukraine. As Ukraine’s counteroffensives in the east
and south forced Russia’s troops to retreat from some areas, a cornered Kremlin
ratcheted up Cold War-era rhetoric.
Russian Foreign Minister
Sergey Lavrov said Tuesday that Moscow would only employ nuclear weapons if the
Russian state faced imminent destruction. Speaking on state TV, he accused the
West of encouraging false speculation about the Kremlin’s intentions.
Russia’s nuclear doctrine
envisions “exclusively retaliatory measures intended to prevent the destruction
of the Russian Federation as a result of direct nuclear strikes or the use of
other weapons that raise the threat for the very existence of the Russian
state,” Lavrov said.
In Brussels, NATO
Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance would hold annual war
exercises testing the state of readiness of its nuclear capabilities next week
as scheduled.
Asked whether it was the wrong
time for them, Stoltenberg replied: “It would send a very wrong signal now if
we suddenly cancelled a routine, longtime-planned exercise because of the war
in Ukraine.”
Stoltenberg called Putin’s
rhetoric “irresponsible” but said he believes “Russia knows that a nuclear war
can never be won and must never be fought.”
NATO as an organization does
not possess nuclear weapons. They remain under the control of three member
countries — the United States, the U.K. and France.
The G-7, leaders who held the
emergency meeting in response to Monday’s attack, said the “indiscriminate
attacks on innocent civilian populations constitute a war crime” and reaffirmed
their “commitment to providing the support Ukraine needs to uphold its sovereignty
and territorial integrity.”
The pledge appeared to come in
response to Kremlin warnings that Western military assistance, including training
Ukrainian soldiers in NATO countries and feeding real-time satellite
data to target Russian forces, increasingly made Ukraine’s allies parties to
the conflict.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry
Peskov said continued U.S. weapons deliveries to Ukraine would prolong the
fighting and inflict more damage on the country without changing Russia’s
objectives.
As Russian forces pounded
three districts around the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant overnight,
Ukraine’s state nuclear operator said Russian forces kidnapped the plant’s
deputy human resources director.
Russians previously detained
the facility’s general director and released him following pressure from
International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi.
Grossi met with Putin on Tuesday in St. Petersburg and urged him to agree to a “safety and security protection zone” around the occupied plant to prevent a radiation disaster.
No comments:
Post a Comment