Ukraine: kyiv claims to have repelled an attack near Blahodatne, which Wagner says he controls

The Ukrainian army claimed on Sunday to have repelled an attack near the village of Blahodatne located in the Donestk region (eastern Ukraine), while the private Russian paramilitary group Wagner claimed to have taken control. kyiv troops “repelled attacks near (…) Blahodatne” and thirteen other localities in the Donestk region, assured the Ukrainian general staff in its daily press release. But the Wagner group had announced a little earlier that its units had taken control of this village.

“Wagner PMC units have taken Blahodatne. Blahodatne is under our control,” said Evguéni Prigojine, leader of the paramilitary group, quoted by his press service. The Russian Ministry of Defense has not confirmed at this stage. Moscow has made the capture of the entire separatist region of Donestk – which Russian President Vladimir Putin proclaimed the annexation at the end of September – the main objective of the conflict in Ukraine. kyiv recently reported that Russian troops have increased their attacks in the east of the country, particularly against the towns of Vougledar and Bakhmout.

Russia seized in January, after intense fighting, the city of Soledar which was its first victory after several months of defeats on the battlefield. Blahodatne is north of Bakhmout, a city coveted for many months by Moscow and where some of the heaviest fighting has taken place since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In addition, local governor Pavlo Kirilenko reported Sunday that five civilians had been killed in attacks in the Donetsk region over the past day, including one person in Bakhmout.

North Korea denies supplying arms to Russia

North Korea on Sunday denied supplying arms to Moscow after Washington accused it of delivering rockets and missiles to the Russian paramilitary group Wagner, engaged in Ukraine. Last week, White House Security Council spokesman John Kirby released US intelligence footage showing alleged Russian train cars returning from North Korea loaded with military equipment, including rockets for Wagner. In the process, the United States designated Wagner as a “criminal organization” and declared to transmit these recordings to the UN as part of the sanctions aimed at Pyongyang.

A senior North Korean government official on Sunday denounced “a stupid attempt to justify” future arms shipments to Ukraine by Washington, which on Thursday promised 31 Abrams tanks to kyiv. Quoted by the official KCNA news agency, the Director General of the North Korean American Affairs Department, Kwon Jong Gun, dismissed this “trumpeted rumor” and warned the United States that they would expose themselves to a “truly undesirable result” if they continued to spread it. “Trying to tarnish the image of (North Korea) by manufacturing something that does not exist is a serious provocation that can never be allowed and can only trigger a reaction,” he added.

Kim Yo Jong, the influential sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, on Friday criticized promises to send arms to Ukraine by the United States, accusing them of “crossing the red line even further “. Russia is, along with China, one of Pyongyang’s few international allies and has already helped the North Korean regime directly. Apart from Syria and Russia, North Korea is the only country to have recognized the independence of Luhansk and Donetsk, two pro-Russian breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine.

Russia, one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, has long argued against tougher international sanctions against North Korea and even called for them to be eased on humanitarian grounds. During a meeting on Sunday in Seoul with South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg expressed concern about Pyongyang’s posture, both in terms of its “dangerous military tests that of his “support for Russia’s war effort” in Ukraine.

Kim Jong Un said in 2022 that he wanted his country to have the most powerful nuclear force in the world, calling in September the North’s nuclear power status “irreversible”. Seoul and Washington lend Pyongyang the intention of carrying out a new nuclear test soon, which would be the seventh in its history and the first since 2017.

Russian shelling kills 3 in Kherson

Russian shelling of residential areas in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson killed at least three people on Sunday, local authorities said. In an area under Russian control in the neighboring region of Zapororijjia, also in the south of the country, the authorities installed by Moscow indicated that four people had been killed by a Ukrainian strike on a railway bridge. The front in southern Ukraine, where the Russian army had to abandon Kherson in November, has recently been much calmer than that in the eastern part of the country, where fierce fighting is taking place, but the shelling from both sides Others never stopped and fighting resumed this week in the Zaporizhia region.

“Enemy artillery hit residential areas of the city,” the regional administration said on social media. She added that a hospital, school, bus station, post office, bank and apartment buildings were hit. These strikes left three dead and six injured, including a nurse, according to the same source. The head of the pro-Russian administration installed by Moscow in Zaporizhia, Yevgeny Balitsky, for his part accused Ukraine of having committed “a strike with Himar multiple rocket launchers against a railway bridge spanning the Molotchnaya river” . “Four members of a railway brigade were killed, five were injured and are being treated medically,” he added.

The bridge is in the villa of Svetlodinskoye, north of the city of Melitopol controlled by Russian forces. According to the same source, work was underway on this infrastructure.