Russia expands strikes on Ukrainian civilian targets after frontline setbacks: UK

By: News Team

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Russia has expanded its attacks on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure in the past week following battlefield setbacks, and is likely to further increase the scope of its targets, it said on Sunday. the United Kingdom.

Ukrainians who returned to the northeastern area retaken in the flash advance from kyiv earlier this month were searching for their dead, while Russian artillery and airstrikes continued to hit targets across the east of the country.

Five civilians were killed in Russian strikes in the eastern Donetsk region over the past day and in Nikopol further west, dozens of residential buildings, gas pipelines and power lines were hit, regional governors said on Sunday.

The British Defense Ministry said Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure, including a power grid and a dam, have intensified in the past seven days.

“As it faces setbacks on the battlefield, Russia has expanded the places it is willing to strike in an attempt to directly undermine the morale of the Ukrainian people and government,” he said in an intelligence update.

On Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address that authorities had found a mass grave with the bodies of 17 soldiers in Izium. Some, he maintained, showed signs of torture.

Residents of Izium have been searching for their dead relatives in a forest pit where emergency workers began exhuming bodies last week. Causes of death for those in the pit have not yet been established, although residents say some were killed in an airstrike.

Ukrainian authorities said last week that they had found 440 bodies in the woods near Izium. They noted that most were civilians.

The Kremlin has not commented on the discovery of the graves, but in the past Moscow has repeatedly denied deliberately targeting civilians or committing atrocities.

Picking his way through the graves and trees at the site of the forest where the exhumations were taking place, Volodymyr Kolesnyk was trying to match the numbers written on the wooden crosses with the names on a handwritten list to locate relatives he said were missing. , were killed in an air raid in the early days of the war.

Kolesnyk said he got the list from a local funeral home that dug the graves. “They buried the bodies in bags, no coffins, nothing. At first they didn’t let me come. They (the Russians) said it was mined and asked me to wait,” he told Reuters on Saturday.

Izium’s mayor said on Sunday that work on the site would continue for another two weeks. “The exhumation is underway, the graves are being dug up and all the remains are being transported to Kharkov,” Valery Marchenko told state television.

In the rest of the region, the inhabitants of the cities reconquered after six months of Russian occupation returned with a mixture of joy and fear.

“I still have a feeling that at any moment a shell can explode or fly over a plane,” said Nataliia Yelistratova, who traveled with her husband and daughter by train from Kharkov to her hometown of Balakliia and found her apartment block untouched. , but with bombing marks.

“I’m still scared to be here,” he said after discovering a piece of shrapnel in a wall.

Ukraine has also launched a major offensive to recapture territory in the south, where it hopes to trap thousands of Russian soldiers cut off from supplies on the west bank of the Dnieper River, and to retake Kherson, the only major Ukrainian city Russia has captured intact since the end. beginning of the war.

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