War against Ukraine: Train stations and a refinery shelled

There have been several Russian attacks on the Ukrainian infrastructure: five train stations have been fired at with rockets. Rockets hit a refinery and a fuel depot near the city of Kremenchuk.

In recent days, Russian attacks in Ukraine have been concentrated primarily in the east and south of the country. Several rockets have apparently also hit western and central Ukraine today. Five railway stations were also hit, said the head of the Ukrainian railways, Oleksandr Kamyshin, on the company’s Telegram channel. According to Kamyshin, the attacks happened within an hour. Details would be checked.

“The Russian armed forces continue to systematically destroy the railway infrastructure,” said Kamyshin. According to him, the route and timetable of several trains had to be changed for safety reasons. There are conflicting reports about possible injuries. The authorities in the western Ukrainian region of Lviv and in Vinnytsia, southwest of Kyiv, also reported rocket attacks.

The governor of the Lviv region, Maksym Kosytskyi, said that a Russian missile hit a railway facility in Krasne, 40 kilometers east of Lviv, in the morning and started a fire.

Rocket attack on refinery near Kremenchuk

Russian forces shelled a refinery and a fuel depot near the central Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk. “High-precision long-range weapons destroyed fuel production facilities at an oil refinery on the northern outskirts of Kremenchuk, as well as storage facilities for petroleum products that fueled military equipment for Ukrainian troops,” the Russian Defense Ministry said.

According to the Ukrainian military administration, nine rockets hit the Kremenchuk refinery and thermal power station. There is considerable damage to buildings, but the fires that have broken out have been contained, wrote the head of administration Dmytro Lunin on Telegram. One person was killed and seven others were injured.

19 more Russian attacks against military targets

The Moscow military report reported that 19 other rocket attacks were aimed at military targets in Ukraine during the night. The Russian forces claimed to have destroyed each of these targets. Six military targets in the eastern Ukrainian region of Kharkiv were destroyed by rocket launches from aircraft. Since Sunday, Russian artillery has fired on almost 970 targets. These Moscow statements on the war are not verifiable.

Attempts to attack towards Kramatorsk

In the east of the country, the Ukrainian military says it has repelled several Russian attacks. “In the direction of Izyum – Barvinkove and Izyum – Kramatorsk the enemy attempted to storm, but were unsuccessful, shelling the villages of Velika Komyshuvahka, Virnopillya and Nova Dmytrivka,” the Ukrainian General Staff said in its situation report.

In the Donetsk area and further south, Russian combat operations were primarily limited to heavy artillery fire on the Ukrainian positions. Only in the small town of Popasna, which has been fought over for weeks, have there been further storm attempts.

In the city of Mariupol, the Azovstal steelworks was hit with bombs and rockets, it said. The General Staff made no statements about its own losses. The Russian side is said to have lost 13 tanks and other military technology. The government in Moscow announced a ceasefire for the area around the steelworks. From 1:00 p.m. (CEST), the Russian troops would “cease all hostilities, withdraw their units to a safe distance and ensure the withdrawal” of civilians, the Russian Defense Ministry said. Previous evacuation attempts had repeatedly failed.

Kryvyj Rih expects an offensive soon

The southern Ukrainian town of Kryvyi Rih is preparing for an imminent attack by Russian troops. The Ukrainian armed forces expect an offensive in the coming days, the local military chief Oleksandr Vikul wrote on Telegram. Multi-level defense lines have been set up and attempts are being made to evacuate civilians from vulnerable areas. Thanks in part to iron ore mining, Kryvyi Rih is an important industrial center for Ukraine. The city has repeatedly been the target of rocket attacks in recent weeks.

Moscow denies plans for secession referendum

Meanwhile, the Russian Foreign Ministry has denied plans that Moscow was planning a referendum on the secession of the southern Ukrainian region of Kherson. “I haven’t heard anything about that,” Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko said in Moscow. Speculations about the preparation of such a referendum as on the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 or in the separatist republics in the Donbass had increased recently. Among other things, leaflets with corresponding calls are said to have appeared in the Cherson region.

According to Ukrainian sources, at least 3,818 civilians were killed in the Russian war of aggression that began a good two months ago. “Injured: more than 4,000,” Ukrainian Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova told the Interfax-Ukraine news agency. However, the statistics are incomplete because the authorities have no access to many places, including the blocked port city of Mariupol. The public prosecutor’s office is currently assuming that at least 215 children were killed and 391 injured. The United Nations has so far recorded around 2,500 civilian deaths, but, like Kyiv, they assume the number of civilian victims to be far higher.