ZAPORIZHZHIA – Russia yesterday launched a fresh assault on the critical Ukrainian port of Odessa as the United States warned that Moscow was preparing formally to annex embattled regions in the east.
The new heavy fighting came as the European Union said it was bracing for a complete end to Russian gas supplies, with the bloc preparing another package of sanctions sure to anger President Vladimir Putin.
After failing to take the capital Kyiv, Moscow has shifted its two-month-old invasion to largely Russian-speaking areas and has stepped up pressure on Odessa, a celebrated cultural hub that is a crucial port on the Black Sea.
Odessa’s city council said that a Russian strike hit a residential building housing five people. A 15-year-old boy was killed and a girl was hospitalised, the council said on Telegram.
“A 14-year-old boy was killed. A 17-year-old girl was wounded, she has a shrapnel wound,” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video address, giving a different age for the boy.
“For what? What did these children...threaten the Russian state with? And that’s how they fight. That’s all,” he said.
Fighting was particularly intense in eastern Ukraine around Izyum, Lyman, and Rubizhne as the Russians prepared an attack on Severodonetsk, the farthest city still under Kyiv’s control, Ukraine’s general staff said.
In Lyman, relentless shelling has reduced hamlets around the city to rubble, according to reporters.
“Half of the city is destroyed,” said one resident, lifting luggage onto the roof of his beat-up Soviet-designed Lada car.
“I don’t have a house anymore,” he said.
The governor of the eastern region of Lugansk expected more intense battles ahead of May 9, the day Russia annually celebrates the 1945 surrender of Nazi Germany to allied forces, including the then-Soviet Union.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, however, told Italian television that Moscow’s forces “will not artificially adjust their actions to any date, including Victory Day”. – AFP, May 3, 2022
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