Moscow accuses kyiv of having bombed, on Sunday January 21 in the morning, a market located in the occupied Ukrainian territories. According to the occupation administration of the Donetsk region, considered by the Russian Federation as an integral part of its territory since autumn 2022, 27 people were killed and 25 injured, including two teenagers, in the deadliest strike on the Donetsk region since the start of the invasion. The Ukrainian authorities remained silent for most of the day. Late in the evening, the country’s media finally reported a statement from the Ukrainian military affirming that it was not responsible for the strike.
Images broadcast on Telegram channels and by the Reuters news agency show bloodied victims on the ground, not far from shops and market stalls destroyed by the bombing. Denis Pushilin, head of the Donetsk People’s Republic, said the Tekstilchchik district was hit at its peak and that the artillery fire came from the Ukrainian-controlled front towns of Krasnohorivka and Kurakhove. Territory emergency services were immediately dispatched to the scene.
“The neo-Nazi regime in kyiv, supported by the United States and its satellites, has once again committed a barbaric terrorist act against the civilian population of Russiacastigated the Russian Foreign Ministry in a press release. These terrorist attacks (…) clearly demonstrate its lack of political will to achieve peace and the settlement of this conflict by diplomatic means. »
Question to the UN
A spokesperson for the United Nations assured on Sunday that the secretary general of the organization, Antonio Guterres, condemned “firmly all attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure, including today’s shelling of Donetsk city”, adding that these are prohibited by international humanitarian law. The strike should be discussed at the UN, where the head of Russian diplomacy, Sergei Lavrov, is going from Monday to attend a meeting of the Security Council.
In December 2023 alone, according to the latest report from the UN human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine, 592 civilians were killed or injured due to Moscow’s intensified strikes on major cities. Ukrainians. The organization’s monitoring group estimates that 29,330 civilians have been killed or injured since the invasion began. The vast majority were in territories controlled by kyiv. A figure considered a low estimate, because it does not take into account civilian casualties in major battles, such as Mariupol, a city now occupied by the Russian army.
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