Im Azovstal Steel Plant in Mariupol According to the Ukrainian military, around 200 civilians are trapped in buried bunkers. The deputy commander of the Azov regiment, which has holed up in the huge factory premises, tells the Reuters news agency that there are children, women and the elderly in the shelters. But his troops don’t have any heavy equipment to clear the entrances, says Swiatoslaw Palamar. The steelworks is the last bastion of Ukrainian troops in the city occupied by the Russian military.
According to Ukrainian information, the port city was hit by a rocket on Monday evening Odesa met at the Black Sea. Maxim Marchenko, the governor of the Odessa region in south-western Ukraine, wrote to Telegram that there were dead and injured. He did not provide any information on the number of people affected. He explained that an infrastructure facility was hit during the attack. He did not say what it was about.
With the introduction of the ruble as a means of payment in the Ukrainian city Kherson Moscow is pushing ahead with its strategy to Russify parts of Ukraine. According to a statement by the British Defense Ministry, the city’s pro-Russian administration has declared that it is impossible for the city, with its approximately 300,000 inhabitants, to return to Ukrainian control. Russia’s plan is aimed at long-term influence in the southern city that was conquered in early March.
“These statements likely indicate Russia’s intention to exert strong long-term political and economic influence in Kherson,” the British ministry report said. Permanent control of the city and its transport links will increase Russia’s ability to sustain advances in northern and western Ukraine and secure control of the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea.
According to Ukrainian information, there was no internet and cell phone reception in the region on Sunday. The Interior Ministry in Kyiv accused the Russian army of shutting down services to cut off truthful reports about the war. Accordingly, Russian television is fed into the TV network.
According to eyewitnesses, the Russian forces recently tightened control over the area. The letter Z – the symbol of the Russian invasion – is projected onto house walls, and the Russian flag flies on government buildings. According to local media reports, a statue of Lenin was recently erected in front of an administration building.
So far it is unclear whether Russia will be successful in introducing its currency in Kherson. Kherson’s Ukrainian Mayor Ihor Kolychayev told the BBC on Saturday that he didn’t think the currency changeover was possible as there was only one Ukrainian banking system in the region.
In Cherson, since the city was captured in the first days of the war, there had been repeated protests by the population against the occupation. According to Ukrainian information, the population also resisted a referendum on the “legalization” of the occupation.
In 2014, Russia held a referendum on the annexation of the occupied peninsula to Russia in neighboring Crimea. The result has not been recognized internationally to this day. Cherson was the first major Ukrainian city to be conquered by Russian troops. So far, the Russian army had avoided war crimes like those committed in Bucha or Mariupol.
According to Ukrainian information, Russia has again attacked non-military targets in Ukraine with rockets. In the area of Dnipropetrovsk a large grain warehouse had been destroyed, the area’s military administration announced on Monday. In addition, she published a video showing a rocket impact. Ukraine is one of the most important grain suppliers in the world.
“Our grain stores give them no rest,” said the head of the military administration of the Dnipropetrovsk region Valentin Resnichenko. According to him, no one was injured. It was at least the third time in Dnipropetrovsk that a non-military farm was said to have been attacked.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is apparently continuing its strategy of also attacking targets in Russia. The southern Russian city Belgorod Not far from the border with Ukraine, two heavy explosions shook the night of Monday, as Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said, according to the Russian state agency TASS. There are initially no reports of damage or victims.
However, there are reports on social media of lightning in the sky. Video footage and reports of alleged Ukrainian drones over Belgorod and the deployment of regional anti-aircraft defenses were circulated on Twitter, the authenticity of which could not initially be independently confirmed. Reports of alleged attacks by the Ukrainian military on targets in Russia have been mounting for several days.
Fighting in Eastern Ukraine
An explosive device damaged a railway bridge in the Kursk region of Russia on the border with Ukraine on Sunday. The regional government said the explosion partially collapsed the bridge near the village of Konopelka. “It was sabotage,” Russian news agency TASS quoted Governor Roman Starovoit as saying. There were no victims, and there were no effects on train traffic.
Fighting between the Ukrainian and Russian armies continued in eastern Ukraine. According to their own account, Ukrainian armed forces repelled a series of Russian attacks in the direction of the large city of Zaporizhia in the south of the country. The pause in fighting that has meanwhile occurred is being used to consolidate the defensive positions, the Unian agency reported on Sunday evening, citing the regional civil and military administrator Olexandr Staruch.
According to Ukrainian authorities, eight civilians were killed in Russian attacks in eastern Ukraine. In the city of Lyman in the Donetsk region, four civilians were killed and eleven others injured by Russian shelling, regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said on Sunday.
Another person was fatally injured in a nearby town. Three more people were killed in attacks on residential areas in and around the city of Kharkiv, regional governor Oleg Synegubov reported. Eight other civilians were injured.
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