War in Ukraine, Day 109 | Moscow targets Western weapons warehouse

(Moscow) The Russian army announced on Sunday that it had struck a site housing weapons supplied by Westerners near Tchortkiv, in western Ukraine largely spared by the fighting, leaving at least 22 injured, including civilians, according to Kyiv. .

In a statement, the Russian Ministry of Defense said that “Kalibr cruise missiles launched from the sea […] destroyed near Chortkiv a large warehouse of anti-tank missile systems, man-portable air defense systems and shells supplied to the Kyiv regime by the United States and European countries”.

The Russian army did not specify when the strike took place, but according to local Ukrainian authorities, a strike on this small town in the west of the country on Saturday evening left at least 22 injured, including civilians, and partially destroyed a military site.

“Yesterday, at 9:46 p.m. local time, Chortkiv was hit by four missiles, all fired from the Black Sea,” regional governor Volodymyr Trouch said during a press conference broadcast on Facebook, adding that ” there were 22 wounded, all hospitalized”.

Among the victims, “there are seven women and a 12-year-old child,” continued the governor.

According to Mr. Trouch, head of the administration of the Ternopil region on which Chortkiv depends, “a military installation was partially destroyed” in the strike, “and residential dwellings were damaged”.

Chortkiv, which had just under 30,000 inhabitants before the Russian offensive, is 140 km north of the border with Romania and 200 km south-east of Lviv, a large city in western Ukraine.

Unlike the east and south of the country, heavily affected by the fighting between Ukrainian and Russian armies for three and a half months, the west has only very sporadically been the target of strikes by Moscow troops, which are aimed in particular military installations receiving Western weapons.

In the East, on the front line where the Russian offensive has been intensifying for several days, the Ukrainian presidency reported in the morning of “constant assaults and artillery bombardments on Sievierodonetsk and the surrounding villages”.

The capture of the city would open up the road to another major city, Kramatorsk, in Moscow, a stage to conquer the entire Donbass basin, a mainly Russian-speaking region partly held by pro-Russian separatists since 2014.