Moscow shoots down a drone over the Black Sea Fleet headquarters in Crimea and blames the attack on kyiv
Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday accepted a mission “as soon as possible” from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant in the face of the existing “risk of catastrophe” due to ongoing clashes in the area. Today he again shows his apparent concern with new accusations of the Ukrainian forces using chemical weapons in the region.
The Russian Ministry of Defense emphasizes an alleged attack perpetrated at the end of July in Vasilyevka, in the Zaporizhia region, the focus of intense fighting in recent weeks. According to a Moscow complaint, doctors found traces of a neurotoxin in several soldiers who were evacuated with serious injuries. The Kremlin, which will transfer the evidence to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, has stated that Volodímir Zelenski’s regime is resorting to “chemical terrorism” in the face of its “military defeats” on the ground.
For his part, the spokesman for the Russian Army, Igor Konashenkov, added that another investigation will be carried out into an alleged chemical poisoning of a military command in the Kherson region, under Russian control since last March. However, at the moment there is no official record that the Ukrainian troops resorted to the use of chemical weapons during the invasion.
This Saturday Moscow also denounced the incursion of a drone in Crimea. Specifically, he reported the shooting down of an unmanned aerial vehicle early in the morning over the main building of the Black Sea fleet, in Sevastopol. “The target was destroyed without casualties or damage,” said Sergei Aksionov, governor of the peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.
The administrative head of Sevastopol, Mikhail Razvozhayev, warned that the remains of the drone fell on the roof of the barracks and blamed the attack on kyiv. The Ukrainian Presidency, for its part, has not made a statement in this regard. It is not the first offensive on the peninsula in recent days. Just this week, an ammunition depot exploded in the area and a drone was shot down over the city of Kerch, according to Russian authorities.
Minors in “serious condition”
Meanwhile, fighting continues in the invaded country, where a Russian bombardment in Voznesensk, near the Pivdennoukrainsk nuclear power plant – the second most powerful in Ukraine -, in the Mykolaiv region, left at least twelve people injured, including three minors. between three and seventeen years old. Two of the children are in “serious condition”, lamented the governor of the region, Vitali Kim. The kyiv Army also said it had shot down four Russian ‘Kalibr’-type cruise missiles near Dnipro that were launched from the Black Sea.
Within a series of air strikes carried out in the last hours on Kharkov, Russia has claimed to have killed some 300 fighters of the Ukrainian forces, including twenty “American mercenaries”. According to the Russian Army spokesman, Igor Konashenkov, the attack, carried out with “high-precision weapons”, has occurred in the vicinity of the city of Andreevka and has resulted in some “80 Ukrainian troops, members of the ultranationalist formation Kraken and other foreign fighters for hire’. Another 200 soldiers would have died in Dnipropetrovsk in an offensive that would have “almost completely destroyed” the battalion of the 110 Territorial Defense Brigade of the kyiv Armed Forces, according to Konashenkov.
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