Ukrainian troops say Russian artillery flattens buildings
\n KYIV\/MOSCOW
\nRussian forces are pounding the city of Lysychansk and its surroundings in an all-out attempt to seize the last stronghold of resistance in eastern Ukraine\u2019s Luhansk province, the governor said Saturday.
\nUkrainian fighters have spent weeks trying to defend the city and to keep it from falling to Russia, as neighboring Sievierodonetsk did a week ago. The Russian Defense Ministry said its forces took control of an oil refinery on Lysychansk\u2019s edge in recent days, but Luhansk Gov. Serhiy Haidai reported Friday that fighting for the facility continued.
\n\u201cOver the last day, the occupiers opened fire from all available kinds of weapons,\u201d Haidai said Saturday on the Telegram messaging app. Luhansk and neighboring Donetsk are the two provinces that make up the Donbas region, where Russia has focused its offensive since pulling back from the northern Ukraine and the capital, Kyiv, in the spring.
\nPro-Russia separatists have held portions of both provinces since 2014, and Moscow recognizes all of Luhansk and Donetsk as sovereign republics. Syria\u2019s government said Wednesday that it would also recognize the \u201cindependence and sovereignty\u201d of the two areas and work to establish diplomatic relations with the separatists.
\nIn Slovyansk, a major Donetsk city still under Ukrainian control, four people died when Russian forces fired cluster munitions late Friday, Mayor Vadym Lyakh said on Facebook. He said the neighborhoods that were hit did not contain any potential military targets. Elsewhere, investigators combed through the wreckage from a Russian airstrike early Friday on residential areas near the Ukrainian port of Odesa that killed 21 people.
\nUkrainian Prosecutor-General Iryna Venediktova said the investigators were recovering fragments from missiles that struck an apartment building in the small coastal town of Serhiivka. They also were taking measurements to determine the trajectory of the weapons, she said.
\n\u201cWe are taking all the necessary investigative measures to determine the specific people guilty of this terrible war crime,\u201d Venediktova said.
\nUkrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said three anti-ship missiles struck \u201can ordinary residential building, a nine-story building\u201d housing about 160 people. The victims of Friday\u2019s attack also included four members of a familystaying at a \u201ctypical\u201d seaside campsite, he said.
\n\u2019I emphasize: this is a deliberate direct Russian terror, and not some mistake or an accidental missile strike,\u201d Zelenskyy said.
\nThe British Defense Ministry said Saturday that air-launched anti-ship missiles generally do not have precision accuracy against ground targets. It said Russia likely was using such missiles because of a shortage of more accurate weapons.
\nThe Kremlin has repeatedly claimed that the Russian military is targeting fuel storage sites and military facilities, not residential areas, although missiles also recently hit an apartment building in Kyiv and a shopping mall in the central city of Kremenchuk. On Saturday, Kremenchuk Mayor Vitaliy Maletskyy said the death toll in the mall attack had risen to 21 and one person was still missing. Ukrainian authorities interpreted the missile attack in Odesa as payback for the withdrawal of Russian troops from a nearby Black Sea island with both symbolic and strategic significance in the war that started with Russia\u2019s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine.
\nMoscow portrayed their departure from Snake Island as a \u201cgoodwill gesture\u201d to help unblock exports of grain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ukrainian troops say Russian artillery flattens buildings KYIV\/MOSCOW Russian forces are pounding the city of Lysychansk and its surroundings in an all-out attempt to seize the last stronghold of resistance in eastern Ukraine\u2019s Luhansk province, the governor said Saturday. Ukrainian fighters have spent weeks trying to defend the city and to keep it from falling […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":269462,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-269435","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n