Chernihiv and Kharkiv under heavy fire

new York Fighting on the front sections in Ukraine continued into Sunday night. At the political level, the government in Kyiv meanwhile launched a strike against pro-Russian parties in the country and had their work banned until further notice. President Volodymyr Zelenskyj once again addressed the people of Russia with drastic words.

The military situation and the humanitarian situation

The city of Kharkiv, besieged by Russian troops and home to 1.5 million people before the start of the war, continues to come under artillery shelling, Unian agency reported. Several residential buildings were hit and caught fire on Saturday evening. The information could not be independently verified.

According to local authorities, 266 civilians have been killed in fighting around the city since Russian troops invaded Ukraine more than three weeks ago. Among them were 14 children, said the judicial authorities in the country’s second largest city on Saturday evening.

In the embattled Ukrainian port of Mariupol, the Russian military is said to have bombed an art school where around 400 people, including women, children and the elderly, were sheltering. This was announced by the local authorities in Mariupol on Sunday in the Telegram news channel.

The building was destroyed in the attack on Saturday. “People are still under the rubble.” Initially, no information was given about the victims. The city council blamed Russian troops. However, this could not be independently verified.

In Mariupol, with a population of 400,000, a theater was recently attacked where people had sought protection from air raids. Those who were buried were rescued. For days, however, it has been unclear how many dead and injured there were in this incident.

Fighting is also continuing in Chernihiv, according to the local mayor. “The indiscriminate artillery shelling of residential areas continues, peaceful people are dying,” said Vladislav Atrashenko, according to the Unian agency. The city is experiencing a humanitarian catastrophe. “There is no electricity, no water, no heating, the city’s infrastructure is completely destroyed.”

The hospital in the city of 300,000 is also repeatedly shot at, which is why medical care has collapsed. In addition, no escape corridor has been set up for the city so far.

After a rocket attack by Russian troops on a barracks in Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine on Friday, helpers recovered at least 50 dead from the rubble on Saturday. A total of around 200 soldiers were sleeping in the building when the rockets hit, as Ukrajinska Pravda reported on Saturday. Almost 60 injured were taken to nearby hospitals.

According to Mayor Olexander Senkevich, the attack took place in the immediate vicinity of Mykolaiv, so it was not possible to sound the alarm in time. The information on the number of victims could not be independently verified.

In defending the country’s airspace, Ukraine continues to be successful, according to the British MoD. The Ukrainian Air Force and Air Defense Forces would “continue to effectively defend it,” the ministry said on Twitter. Russia has failed to achieve air supremacy and relies largely on standoff weapons fired from the relative safety of Russian airspace to hit targets in Ukraine.

Gaining control of the airspace was one of Russia’s main goals in the early days of the war. The continued failure to do so has “significantly impacted Russia’s operational progress.”

A spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force, Yurii Ihnat, confirmed to Ukrainian media on Saturday that an ammunition depot of the Ukrainian Air Force in the western Ivano-Frankivsk region was shelled. However, it has yet to be confirmed whether the missile deployed by Russia was the hypersonic Kinzhal missile, he said.

Earlier, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said the Russian military hit the ammunition depot on Friday during the first combat use of the hypersonic missile. According to Russian information, the missile, which is fired by MiG-31 fighter jets, has a range of up to 2,000 kilometers and flies at ten times the speed of sound.

New video message from Ukrainian President Zelensky

According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the siege of the port city of Mariupol will go down in history as a war crime by the Russian military. “To do to a peaceful city what the occupiers did is a terror that will be remembered for centuries to come,” he said Sunday in his late-night video address to the nation.

The ongoing negotiations with Russia are “not easy or pleasant, but they are necessary.” Zelensky said he discussed the course of talks with French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday. “Ukraine has always sought a peaceful solution. Moreover, we are now interested in peace,” he said.

He also addressed the Russian population with martial words about heavy Russian war losses. In some places, the Russian military does not recover the bodies of its soldiers. “In places where there has been particularly heavy fighting, the bodies of Russian soldiers are simply piled up along our line of defences. And nobody is collecting these corpses, these bodies,” he continued. “And they’re chasing new units over them, any reserves that the Russian commanders are gathering somewhere.”

He described a battle near Chernobaivka in the south in which Ukrainian forces held their positions and the Russians repulsed six times. This would have simply sent their people on “to the slaughter”.

He can understand that Russia has almost endless reserves of soldiers and military equipment. “But I would like to know from the citizens of Russia: what has been done to you in those years that you did not notice your losses?”. More than 14,000 Russian soldiers have already been killed. “That’s 14,000 mothers, 14,000 fathers, wives, children, relatives, friends – and you don’t notice it?”

The Ukrainian account of the killed Russian soldiers cannot be independently verified – just as little as that of their own military losses, which the state leadership put at around 1,300 soldiers around a week ago. So far, the Russian side has officially confirmed just under 500 of their own casualties.

Rail connections between Ukraine and Belarus probably interrupted

Belarusian railway workers have apparently cut off all rail connections between Belarus and Ukraine. The chairman of the Ukrainian railways, Olexander Kamyshin, thanked his colleagues in Belarus for the unspecified action on Saturday.

“As of today I can say that there is no rail traffic between Belarus and Ukraine,” he was quoted as saying by the Unian agency. This would mean that Russian troops in Ukraine would not receive reinforcements or supplies via these routes.

An adviser to the Belarusian opposition icon Svetlana Tichanovskaya also reported on the alleged action on Twitter. “Heroes! Belarusian railway workers have cut the railway connection with Ukraine, so trains with Russian equipment cannot go to Ukraine,” wrote Franak Viachorka.

The alleged action could not be confirmed by independent sources. Although Russian troops have invaded Ukraine from Belarus, authoritarian Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who is considered a protégé of Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin, has so far refused to allow his troops to take part in the war in the neighboring country.

The Ukrainian Security Council temporarily bans the work of pro-Russian parties

President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his video message on the night that the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine has banned the work of a number of pro-Russian parties for the duration of martial law in the country. “The activities of their politicians aimed at division or collaboration will not succeed, but will receive a harsh response,” Zelensky was quoted as saying by Ukrajinska Pravda.

More on the Ukraine war:

The parties affected include the “Opposition Platform – From Lifetime” and the “Opposition Block”, which are also represented in Parliament. Like the other nine extra-parliamentary parties that have now been banned, they are considered Eurosceptic, anti-liberal or pro-Russian. According to Zelensky, the Justice Department was instructed to implement the Security Council decision.

With agency material

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