KYIV, June 5 (Reuters) – Spared for more than a month, Ukraine’s capital Kyiv was again targeted by Russian missiles on Sunday morning while on Ukraine’s eastern front, Ukrainian forces recaptured half of the industrial city of Sievierodonetsk.
Two neighborhoods on the outskirts of Kyiv, where you could see columns of black smoke, were hit. Russia claims to have hit a tank repair center from Eastern European countries.
The Ukrainian authorities indicated that it was a center for the repair of wagons and that there was no military equipment on the premises. They added that Russia had carried out strikes by firing long-range missiles from the Caspian Sea.
At least one person has been taken to hospital but no deaths have yet been reported following the missile strikes.
“The Kremlin is resorting to new sneak attacks. Today’s missile strikes on kyiv have only one goal: to kill as many people as possible,” Mikhalo Podolyak, adviser to the president, wrote on Twitter. Ukrainian Volodimir Zelensky.
In recent weeks, Russian forces have concentrated their offensive on the eastern and southern fronts of Ukraine. But Russia is carrying out strikes in other sectors to weaken Ukrainian military infrastructure and block arms deliveries from Western countries.
In Sievierodonetsk, an industrial city considered decisive for the control of Donbass, after losing ground to the Russian advance in intense fighting, the Ukrainian forces led a counter-attack which took the Russian army by surprise.
DIVIDED INTO TWO
According to the governor of Luhansk province, Serhiy Haida, Ukrainian forces have now regained control of half the city and are continuing to push back the Russians.
“The situation was difficult, the Russians controlled 70% of the city. But in the last two days they were pushed back,” the governor told Ukrainian television. “The city is now, more or less, split in two.”
These claims could not be independently verified.
Moscow for its part ensures that its troops are still progressing in the industrial city.
According to the Ukrainian army, Russian forces continue to carry out assaults with the support of artillery and control the eastern part of Sievierodonetsk.
The evacuations of civilians were also able to resume on Sunday in the part of the province of Luhansk held by the Ukrainians, let know the governor of the province who specifies that 98 people were able to be evacuated.
Russian forces have been trying for weeks to surround the Ukrainians in the area. The evacuations were interrupted last week after the death of a French journalist, killed in the bombings.
HOLD BACK THE RUSSIANS
Britain’s Defense Secretary said on Sunday that Ukrainian attacks on Sievierodonetsk in the past 24 hours were likely to cause great harm to the Russians.
A journalist from a state television channel said on Sunday that a Russian army general had been killed in clashes, adding to the series of high-ranking military casualties suffered by Moscow.
The Russian soldiers were also advancing in the neighboring region of Donetsk north of the Seversky Donets River, suggesting that they were heading towards the city of Sloviansk.
According to the Ukrainian authorities, at least eight people were killed and eleven were injured in Russian shelling in the province overnight.
In an address delivered on Sunday in Rome, Pope Francis said that more than 100 days had passed since “the beginning of an armed aggression against Ukraine”. He called the war “the denial of God’s dream”.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has meanwhile warned Western countries that Russia will strike new targets if the United States begins supplying Ukraine with long-range missiles, the TASS news agency reported on Sunday.
Vladimir Putin considers that the purpose of arms deliveries to Ukraine is to prolong the conflict.
The United States said last week that it would send medium-range missiles to Ukraine. This decision comes after Kyiv pledged not to use these missiles against targets in Russia. (Report Natalia Zinets, Pavel Polityuk and Lidia Kelly, French version Matthieu Protard and Caroline Pailliez)