Russia hit a Neptune missile factory in the Kyiv region.
In the aftermath of the sinking of its flagship in the Black Sea, Russia promised Friday to intensify its strikes on kyiv in response to attacks which it describes as “terrorist”, the first targeting the manufacturer of the Neptune missiles with which the Ukrainians claim to have sunk the “Moskva”.
“The number and scale of missile strikes on Kyiv sites will increase in response to all terrorist-type attacks and sabotage carried out on Russian territory by the nationalist regime in Kyiv,” warned the Russian Ministry of defense.
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During the night, a missile factory in the kyiv region was hit by a Russian strike, AFP journalists on the spot noted on Friday. The Russian ministry has for its part announced the destruction of a missile production workshop in the Vizar factory located in the suburbs of kyiv.
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The Vizar factory is one of the Ukrainian factories which manufacture these missiles, indicates on its website UkrOboronProm, the state holding company which oversees the Ukrainian arms factories.
A factory workshop and an administrative building adjoining it, located in the town of Vyshnevé, about thirty kilometers south-west of the Ukrainian capital, were seriously damaged, AFP noted. About fifty vehicles parked in the nearby car park also had their windows blown.
A craftsman, Andrii Sizov, 47, told AFP that he had heard “five knocks”. “For me, this is the bill for the destruction of the Moskva,” he said. Russia has so far claimed that the cruiser Moskva, flagship of its Black Sea Fleet, suffered a fire and detonations from its own ammunition on Wednesday. The ship sank on Thursday. The Ukrainians claimed to have hit the ship with domestically manufactured Neptune cruise missiles, inflicting a major setback and humiliation on the Russian military.
Russia also said Thursday that Ukraine had bombed Russian border villages, including an incursion of helicopter gunships into Russian territory. kyiv rejected these accusations, and in return accused the Russian special services of carrying out “terrorist attacks” in the border region to fuel “anti-Ukrainian hysteria”. The Russian Investigative Committee claimed that two Ukrainian helicopters ‘equipped with heavy weapons’ entered Russia and carried out ‘at least six strikes on apartment buildings in the village of Klimovo’, in the Bryansk region .
Seven people, including a baby, were injured “to varying degrees”, according to these Russian accusations, the validity of which is impossible to verify independently.
Seven civilians were killed and 27 injured Thursday in Russian fire on evacuation buses in the Kharkiv region
Ukraine’s general prosecutor’s office said on Friday that seven civilians were killed and 27 injured Thursday in Russian fire on evacuation buses in the eastern Kharkiv region. In the Kherson region (south), a new exchange of Russian and Ukrainian prisoners of war took place on Thursday, the Ukrainian army announced on Friday.
Russia also claimed to have killed around 30 “Polish mercenaries” in a strike carried out in northeastern Ukraine. In addition, Moscow on Friday warned Sweden and Finland against NATO membership of Sweden and Finland which would have “consequences” for these countries and European security. Helsinki and Stockholm are considering joining the Atlantic Alliance in reaction to the Russian military offensive against Ukraine.
The loss of the Moskva cruiser is “a severe blow” to the Russian fleet in the region, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Thursday, with “consequences for their combat capabilities”. The ship “provided air cover for the other vessels during their operations, in particular the bombardment of the coast and the landing maneuvers”, detailed for his part the spokesman for the regional military administration of Odessa Sergei Bratchouk.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky drove home the point in a video message late Thursday, saying the Ukrainians had “shown that Russian ships can only go to the bottom”. Military setbacks in Ukraine could prompt Russian President Vladimir Putin to resort to a tactical or low-power nuclear weapon in that country, William Burns, the head of the CIA, the main US intelligence agency, warned on Thursday.
But “we haven’t really seen any concrete signs like military deployments or measures that could heighten our concerns,” he insisted.
Translating into words the level of extreme hostility reached in this conflict, as well as the gravity of the atrocities attributed to Russian forces, the Ukrainian Parliament voted on Thursday a resolution qualifying the Russian offensive as “genocide”.
In the largest region of Donbass, that of Donetsk, where “fighting is taking place on the entire front line”, three people were killed and seven injured, according to the Ukrainian presidency. The other region of this mining basin, that of Lugansk, was the scene of 24 bombings which left two dead and two injured, according to the same source.
Russia, whose announced massive offensive in the Donbass has still not started, is struggling to take full control of Mariupol, a strategic port in the Sea of Azov.
President Zelensky has remained since the beginning of the war entrenched with his administration in the center of the capital, from where he has not ceased to demand from the West deliveries of heavy armaments which are lacking to resist the firepower of the Russians.
“Russia has brought thousands of tanks, artillery pieces and all sorts of heavy weapons to the region, simply hoping to crush our army,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Thursday.
Thousands of tanks
US President Joe Biden finally acceded to Ukraine’s request on Wednesday, promising massive new military aid of $800 million, including armor and long-range guns.
It is in Mariupol (south-east) that could be recorded in the immediate future the heaviest human toll of this war. The Ukrainian authorities have mentioned some 20,000 dead.
The martyred port city, where AFP was able to visit during a press trip organized this week by the Russian army, suffered a deluge of fire, which devastated the infrastructure and homes of the half- million people who lived there when Vladimir Putin launched his offensive against Ukraine on February 24.
Galina Vasilyeva, 78, pointed to a nine-story building completely burnt down. “People are burned inside,” says this retiree, queuing in front of a truck of pro-Russian separatists distributing humanitarian aid.
Today, after more than forty days, the fighting is confined to the vast industrial zone near the seaside, as Russian forces and their separatist allies in Donetsk have imposed and then gradually tightened their terrible siege.
The conquest of this city would allow the Russians to consolidate their territorial gains by linking the Donbass region, partly controlled by pro-Russian separatists since 2014, with Crimea annexed the same year.
Analysts say Russian President Vladimir Putin, mired in the face of fierce Ukrainian resistance, wants to secure a victory in Donbass ahead of the May 9 military parade in Red Square marking the Soviet victory over the Nazis in 1945.