The UN secretary general said he was “appalled” and the EU denounced new “atrocities” on Thursday after Russian strikes on a town in central Ukraine that left at least 23 dead, an “act openly terrorist” for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
In Vinnytsia, a city far from the front lines, well west of the capital kyiv, images released by Ukraine’s Emergency Situations Service showed dozens of charred carcasses and a building with about ten floors devastated by the explosion and the fire that followed.
According to the Ukrainian army, “three missiles” hit the parking lot and this commercial building in the center of the city, housing offices and small shops. They were fired from submarines in the Black Sea, Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yuri Ignat said.
“Every day Russia kills civilians, kills Ukrainian children, fires missiles at civilian targets where there is nothing military. What is it, if not an openly terrorist act? “, said Volodymyr Zelensky immediately after the strike which occurred at the end of the morning in a region of the country until then relatively spared by the war.
The Russian Ministry of Defense, quoted on Telegram by the editor-in-chief of the public media group Rossia Segodnya, Margarita Simonian, claimed to have targeted Vinnytsia “the House of Officers, where nationalists had been deployed”.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres for his part said he was “appalled”, recalling that the organization condemned “any attack against civilians or civilian infrastructure”, according to his spokesperson.
The EU slammed Russia’s “barbaric behavior”.
“These atrocities in Vinnytsia are the latest in a long series of brutal attacks targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure,” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell and EU commissioner for disaster management said in a statement. Janez Lenarcic fits. “There can be no impunity for the violations and crimes committed by the Russian forces and their political leaders”.
“Special Court”
These new strikes came precisely as a conference on crimes committed in Ukraine was being prepared in The Hague, organized by the International Criminal Court (ICC), the European Commission and the Netherlands.
In a videoconference intervention Volodymyr Zelensky called for the creation of a “special tribunal” responsible for judging “the crimes of Russian aggression against Ukraine”.
Before the conference in The Hague, attended by the Ministers of Justice and Foreign Affairs of EU countries, he reported 20 dead “including three children” and “many” injured.
Ukrainian relief then revised this toll upwards: 23 dead and 39 missing.
The head of Ukrainian diplomacy, Dmytro Kouleba, present in The Hague, denounced a new “Russian war crime”.
At the same time, the OSCE for its part was alarmed by the treatment inflicted by Moscow on Ukrainian civilians in “filtration camps” to determine possible links with the armed forces. “If so, these people are separated from others and often simply disappear,” OSCE experts point out in a report.
Strikes on the south
For several weeks, Russian strikes away from the front lines had been relatively rare.
But the war is now raging around cities like the strategic port of Mykolaiv (south), near the Black Sea, which was hit early Thursday morning by a “massive missile strike” for the second consecutive day.
“Two schools, transport infrastructure and a hotel were damaged,” the presidency said in its daily morning briefing.
Footage released by local authorities shows the remains of a building destroyed by bombardment, with municipal workers picking up debris strewn from the attack.
Ukraine, for its part, launched a counter-offensive several weeks ago to retake Kherson, the only regional capital captured by Moscow since February 24. While the front line remains relatively stable, these attacks are increasingly powerful, with new US and European rocket systems targeting arms depots.
“Total Victory”
The main battles, however, remain concentrated in eastern Ukraine and the Donbass, an industrial and mining basin that Moscow has promised to completely conquer.
According to the governor of the Lugansk region, Sergiï Gaïdaï, “massive artillery and mortar attacks continue (and) the Russians are trying to break through towards Siversk and open the way towards Bakhmout”, where a civilian died in bombings in the night from Wednesday to Thursday.
The pro-Russian separatists supported by Moscow claim for their part to be close to winning a new victory there, a few days after taking several important cities.
“Siversk is under our operational control, which means that the enemy can be hit by our fire in the whole area,” said a separatist official, Daniïl Bezsonov, quoted by the Russian news agency TASS.
AFP was unable to independently confirm this information.
A little further north, in the region of Izioum, “we dig when it’s calm, we hide when it’s shooting”, confided to AFP a Ukrainian soldier in labyrinthine trenches several tens of meters long built by the Ukrainian army, to the sound of artillery fire.
One of the officers, however, declared that “the situation is under control”, affirming that the Russian army was no longer advancing in this area and that the objective for Ukraine was now “total victory”.
Hope on cereals
On Wednesday, during a meeting of military experts in Istanbul, Russia and Ukraine also made progress on the thorny issue of blocking grain exports from Ukrainian ports.
“Really substantial progress” has been made, commented UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who said he hoped a “formal agreement” could be concluded soon and spoke of “a ray of hope to alleviate the suffering humanity and hunger in the world”.
The negotiations launched more than two months ago aim to export through the Black Sea some 20 million tonnes of grain blocked in Ukrainian silos, particularly in Odessa, while facilitating Russian exports of grain and fertilizers.
Ukraine is one of the world’s leading exporters of wheat and other cereals and time is running out as rising global food prices pose the risk of famine, particularly in Africa.
The war in Ukraine is the “biggest challenge” for the global economy, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Thursday ahead of a G20 meeting in Indonesia.
Oil prices also briefly slumped by more than 5% on Thursday, falling to levels not seen since the start of the war, carried away by fears of a global recession in a context of record inflation in the United States and in the euro zone. euro.
President Emmanuel Macron warned him that the conflict in Ukraine would “last” and that the French should prepare to do without Russian gas, which Moscow uses as a “weapon of war”.