New York.- Five people were killed on Saturday in a Russian airstrike in the city of Chasiv Yar, while Moscow’s troops continued their attacks in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine.
The attack hit a high-rise building and a private home, regional governor Vadym Filaskhin said, adding that the victims were men aged between 24 and 38. He urged remaining residents to leave the town, which is on the front line and had a pre-war population of 12,000.
“Normal life has been impossible in Chasiv Yar for more than two years,” Filaskhin wrote on social media. “Do not become a Russian target – evacuate.”
Two other people were killed by Russian strikes in the Kharkiv region. One of the victims was pulled from the rubble of a house in the village of Cherkaska Lozova, Governor Oleh Syniehubov said, while a second woman died of her injuries while being taken to a hospital.
Meanwhile, the Russian Defense Ministry said it had captured the town of Pivnichne, also in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. The Associated Press could not independently verify that claim.
Russian forces have penetrated further into the partially occupied eastern region of Ukraine, and its complete capture is one of the Kremlin’s main ambitions. The Russian army is close to Pokrovsk, an important logistical hub for Ukrainian defence in the area.
At the same time, Ukraine has sent its forces into Russia’s Kursk region in recent weeks, the largest incursion into Russian territory since World War II. This action is part of an effort to force Russia to withdraw its troops from the front in Donetsk.
Meanwhile, the number of wounded continues to rise following Friday’s Russian attack on the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
Six people were killed, including a 14-year-old girl, when glider bombs hit five locations in the city, the region’s governor, Oleh Syniehubov, said. In a post on social media on Saturday, he said the number of injured had risen from 47 to 96.
Syniehubov also confirmed that the 12-storey apartment block that was hit by shelling and caused the building to catch fire, trapping at least one person on one of the upper levels, would be partially demolished.
Ukrainian officials have previously pointed to the Kharkiv attacks as further evidence that Western partners must remove restrictions on what the Ukrainian military can target with donated weapons.
In an interview with CNN on Friday, Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov said that kyiv had submitted a list of possible long-range targets inside Russia to Washington for approval. “I hope that we have been listened to,” he said.
He also denied speculation that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s decision to dismiss the country’s air force commander on Friday was directly linked to the destruction of an F-16 warplane that Ukraine received from its Western partners four days earlier.
The order to dismiss Lieutenant General Mykola Oleshchuk was posted on the presidential website minutes before a speech in which Zelenskyy stressed the need to “take care of all our soldiers.”
“These are two separate issues,” Umerov said. “At this point, I would not connect them.”
The number of wounded also rose in the Russian border region of Belgorod, where five people were killed on Friday by Ukrainian shelling, said Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov. On Sunday, he said 46 people had been injured, of whom 37 were hospitalized, including seven children.
In a post on social media, Gladkov also said two other people had been injured by Ukrainian strikes in the region.
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