Ukraine was targeted by numerous Russian bombardments on Wednesday, its national day and exactly six months after the invasion began, including a salvo that hit a train station and left at least 25 dead, kyiv said Thursday. For its part, Russia claimed to have killed “more than 200 Ukrainian soldiers” by hitting a military train in this strike.
“The number of bombardments on towns and villages has increased. In the past 24 hours, the police have recorded 58, far more than what we usually see,” Evhen Enin, Ukrainian Deputy Interior Minister, said on Telegram.
According to local media, nine Ukrainian regions were bombed on Wednesday, and a total of 189 warning sirens sounded across the country, a record since the start of the war on February 24.
The bombardments notably targeted four districts in the Dnipropetrovsk region (center), according to its governor Valentin Reznitchenko, who spoke on Telegram of “a very difficult night” with announcements of attacks and victims “permanently”.
Several missiles notably hit the railway station and homes in Tchapliné, a village of nearly 3,000 inhabitants, killing “25 dead, including two children, and 32 injured” according to a latest report provided Thursday morning on Telegram by the train operator. Ukrainians.
The search for survivors continued Thursday morning, according to Governor Reznichenko.
The deadly bombardment on Chapliné was announced Wednesday evening by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a speech before the UN Security Council, reporting an initial death toll of 22. Including “five people who burned in a wagon” and “an 11-year-old boy” killed by “a Russian rocket that destroyed his house”.
“We are going to make the abusers pay for everything they have done. And we will drive them out of our land,” he added.
Russia also presented its version of the event. An Iskander missile “directly hit a military train at the Chapline station in the Dnipropetrovsk region, killing more than 200 servicemen from the Ukrainian Armed Forces reserve” as well as equipment, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement. communicated.
According to local Ukrainian authorities, Wednesday’s Russian strikes targeted various regions, from Khmelnytsky, in the west of the country, far from the front, to Mykolaiv (south), one of the most bombed cities since the beginning of the war, where they notably targeted port infrastructure, passing through Kharkiv (north-east) and Donetsk (east).
Cluster munitions
Fighting and shelling in Ukraine have decreased in intensity since early July.
Since the withdrawal of Russian forces from around kyiv in late March, the bulk of the fighting has been concentrated in the east, where Moscow slowly gained ground before the front froze, and in the south, where troops Ukrainians say they are carrying out a counter-offensive, which is also very slow.
However, Russia continues to regularly target other regions with long-range missiles, even though kyiv and its surroundings are rarely hit.
Russia has used cluster munitions on a massive scale in Ukraine, causing hundreds of civilian casualties and damaging homes, schools and hospitals, a watchdog, the Cluster Munitions Monitor, said on Thursday. Munition Coalition, CMC) in its annual report.
“Today marks a sad and tragic milestone,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday of the anniversary of the outbreak of the fighting, which left tens of thousands dead and injured.
Deploring the consequences of this “absurd war far beyond Ukraine”, he reiterated his “deep concern” about the military activities at the site of the Ukrainian nuclear power plant in Zaporizhia, occupied by Russian forces since the beginning of March.
The plant, the largest in Europe, suffered strikes for which the two belligerents accuse each other. “Any further escalation of the situation could lead to self-destruction,” he warned.
The directors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, and the Russian atomic agency Rosatom, Alexei Likhachev, met in Istanbul (Turkey) to discuss an inspection of the facilities.
Russia must stop its “nuclear blackmail and simply withdraw from the plant”, meanwhile hammered Mr. Zelensky before the Security Council. “The IAEA mission must as soon as possible take permanent control of the situation” in Zaporijjia.
Sober tributes
Symbolic manifestation of Western support, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson made a surprise visit to kyiv on Wednesday. “There is a strong will among Ukrainians to resist. And that’s what (Russian President Vladimir) Putin didn’t understand,” he said.
After a semester of war, the anniversary of independence acquired in 1991 from the USSR did not give rise to festivities, even if the Ukrainian diaspora organized numerous gatherings around the world ( France, Poland, Israel…).
Volodymyr Zelensky and his wife paid tribute to fallen Ukrainian soldiers by observing a minute’s silence and laying yellow and blue bouquets — the colors of the national flag — at a memorial in central kyiv, before attending a rally at the cathedral Saint Sophia with the heads of the main religious denominations.
Ukraine on Monday acknowledged the death of nearly 9,000 soldiers since the start of the conflict – a toll probably lower than the reality, according to observers. On the Russian side, nearly 80,000 soldiers have been killed or injured since the start of the invasion, the number three in the American Pentagon estimated in early August.