They hit a military facility and two residential buildings, while in Mariupol Russian troops resumed the siege of the Azovstal steel mill
A military installation and two residential buildings (one of them with sixteen floors) received the impact of several Russian missiles in the port city of Odessa on Saturday, causing at least six deaths and around twenty wounded. The attack occurred after two in the afternoon (local time), when at least four cruise missiles flew over from the Caspian Sea. Two of them, according to the Ukrainian Army, hit targets, the others were shot down.
The impact on the sixteen-story tower caused extensive damage to its fourth and fifth floors with a major fire. At least a hundred emergency personnel (including firefighters and rescue workers) were deployed in the affected areas. Late in the afternoon, the balance of victims raised the deceased from five to six – including a three-month-old baby – and placed the number of injured at eighteen.
“The only objective of the Russian missile attacks against Odessa is terror. Russia must be designated as a state sponsor of terrorism and treated accordingly,” the head of Ukrainian diplomacy Dmytro Kuleba said on Twitter, calling for building “a wall between civilization and the barbarians who attack peaceful cities with missiles.”
The city of Odesa already received at the beginning of the month the impact of at least six missiles in its industrial area hitting a refinery, although on that occasion there were no fatalities. As reported by the Colonel of the Southern Operational Command of the Ukrainian Army, Vladislav Nazarov, there are no fatalities as a result of the attack.
The Russian Ministry of Defense assured in a communication collected by the government agency Tass that its “high-precision missiles destroyed a logistics terminal” in which, it says, “foreign weapons were being stored.” It would be, according to the Kremlin, a deposit of weapons delivered by the United States and other allied countries in a military airport near Odessa.
Before the shelling that left six dead in the coastal city, another artillery shelling was confirmed in Zolote, in the eastern region of Lugansk, according to Governor Serhiy Haidai, who also asked people living near the front line « evacuate the place, if they get the chance.”
Meanwhile, this Saturday a new attempt was made to evacuate civilians from Mariupol, on a day in which the Russian Army intensified the bombardments against the Azovstal steel mill, where the last resistance fighters are entrenched.
Easter curfew
The Russian military announced on Saturday morning that it had carried out a total of 1,098 artillery and rocket attacks in the past 24 hours. “They are literally bombing everything (…), all the time,” Gadai denounced.
An inertia that has not stopped due to the celebration of Orthodox Easter and that yesterday led kyiv to declare “a curfew in the cities and towns of Ukraine. Let’s stay at home for our safety,” confirmed the deputy head of the office of the President of Ukraine, Kirilo Tymoshenko. The curfew was raised especially for Zaporizhia, Kharkov and part of Kherson, as well as in the areas under its control in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, where the Kremlin has focused its offensive.
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