The blast came as Russia focused its ever-increasing attacks on areas of Ukraine it had illegally occupied.
The blast came as Russia focused its ever-increasing attacks on areas of Ukraine it had illegally occupied.
A series of explosions in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv sent plumes of light smoke into the sky and several other explosions in the early hours of Saturday.
There were no immediate reports of casualties
The blast comes hours after Russia focused attacks on its ever-increasing crisis. invasion of ukraine In areas it had occupied illegally, the death toll from earlier missile attacks on apartment buildings in the southern city of Zaporizhzhya rose to 14.
Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said on Telegram that the early morning blast was the result of missile attacks that hit one of the city’s medical institutions, a non-residential building and other places.
Awarded by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his conduct of Europe’s worst armed conflict since World War II Nobel Peace Prize to a jailed activist in Belarus, an ally of Russia and human rights organizations in her country and Ukraine,
Committee chairman Berit Rees-Andersen said the honor went to “three outstanding champions of human rights, democracy and peaceful coexistence”.
Putin illegally claimed four regions of Ukraine as Russian territory this weekIncluding the Zaporizhzhya region, which is home to Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, whose reactors were shut down last month.
Fighting near the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant has worried the UN nuclear power watchdog, which on Friday doubled its number of inspectors overseeing plant safety measures to four. Ukraine’s Minister of Environmental Protection Ruslan Strillets said on Friday that an accident could release 10 times more potentially lethal radiation than the world’s worst nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, Ukraine, 36 years ago.
“The consequences of the occupation, shelling and mining conditions of the Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plants by Russian troops will be global,” Strillets told the Associated Press.
The UN watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, reported further trouble at the plant, saying on Twitter on Friday that external power had been cut again to one of Zaporizhzhya’s shutdown reactors, prompting emergency backup diesel to run safety systems. Required the use of a generator.
The city of Zaporizhzhia is located 53 kilometers (33 mi) from the nuclear plant as a crow flies and remains under Ukrainian control. To bolster Russia’s claim to the region, Russian forces bombed the city with S-300 missiles on Thursday, with more attacks reported on Friday.
Ukrainian officials said the death toll from the attack on apartment buildings rose to 14 on Friday, while 12 people wounded in the bombing were hospitalized.
Zaporizhzhya Governor Oleksandr Starukh said the missiles hit the city overnight, injuring one person. He said Russia also used Iran-made Shaheed-136 drones there for the first time and damaged two infrastructure facilities.
Russia deploys unmanned, disposable Iranian-made drones
With its forces defeated by Ukraine’s counterattacks in the south and east, Russia has deployed unmanned, disposable Iranian-made drones that are cheaper and less sophisticated than missiles but can still damage ground targets.
The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said Russia’s use of explosives-laden drones is unlikely to affect the course of the war.
“They have used several drones against civilian targets in past areas, possibly hoping to generate non-effect through terror. Such efforts are not succeeding,” wrote analysts at the think tank.
In other areas linked to Moscow, Russia’s defense ministry reported Friday that its forces had repelled Ukrainian advances near the city of Lyman and had retaken three villages elsewhere in the eastern Donetsk region. The ministry also claimed that Russian forces had prevented Ukrainian troops from advancing into several villages in the southern Kherson region.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly video address on Friday that this week alone, his army has captured an area of 776 square kilometers (300 sq mi) in the east and 29 settlements, including six in the Luhansk region, which Putin has called. has captured. In total, Ukrainian forces have liberated 2,434 square kilometers (940 sq mi) of land and 96 settlements since the start of their counter-offensive, he said.
In Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, Russian troops shelled the city of Nikopol overnight, killing one person, injuring another and damaging buildings, natural gas pipelines and power systems, the governor reported. Located on the banks of the Dnieper River from Russian-occupied territory near the Nikopol Nuclear Power Plant. Shelling has been going on in the city for several weeks.
The trail of Russia’s devastation and death toll from the areas where its troops had retreated became clear on Friday. A report by Ukraine’s First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Yevgen Yesenin revealed that the bodies of 530 civilians have been found in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region since September 7.
Mass grave in Izium
Yesenin said residents killed during the Russian occupation included 257 men, 225 women and 19 children, with 29 unidentified. Most of the bodies were found in the past Mass grave uncovered in the city of Izium,
According to Yesenin, there were marks of bullets, explosions and torture on the bodies recovered. Some had ropes around their necks, hands tied behind their backs, bullet wounds on their knees and broken ribs.
Serhi Bolvinov, a regional police officer, said authorities had identified 22 torture sites in parts of the Kharkiv region that were recently liberated by Ukrainian forces.
In the recently recaptured Lyman, workers found 200 individual graves and a mass grave with an unknown number of victims, Donetsk Governor Pavlo Kirilenko reported on Telegram. In Sviatohirsk, 24 kilometers (15 mi) from Liman, 21 bodies of civilians were reburied.
Meanwhile, Russian military equipment and weapons are falling into Ukrainian hands. Britain’s Defense Ministry said on Friday that Ukrainian forces have captured at least 440 tanks and about 650 armored vehicles since the Russian offensive began on February 24.
“The failure by the Russian crews to destroy intact equipment before withdrawing or surrendering exposes the poor state of their training and the low level of combat discipline,” the British ministry said. “With Russian formations in severe tension in many areas and with increasingly demoralized troops, Russia is likely to lose heavy weapons.”
Putin last month ordered a partial mobilization of Russian military reservists to bolster manpower on the front lines in Ukraine. However, mistakes have stymied the military call-up, and tens of thousands of men have fled Russia, unprepared to fight Putin’s war.
This has left Russia desperate for military reinforcements. The Ukrainian military said on Friday it has mobilized 500 former criminals to bolster Russian ranks in the eastern Donetsk region, where Ukrainian forces have retaken the area. The army said law enforcement officers were commanding the new units.
Russia’s state news agency Tass reported Friday that a court in the Russian city of Penza had dismissed the first case against a Russian man who was called for service but who refused. Lawyers for the 32-year-old had argued that the law under which he was charged only applies to recruited thieves, and not those subject to partial mobilization.
In another sign of trouble, there have been reports of poor training and few supplies for the new Russian troops. At least two Russian cities – St Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod – announced on Friday that they were canceling their Russian New Year and Christmas celebrations and redirecting that money to buy supplies for Russian troops.
Under increasing pressure from his own supporters and critics, Putin continued to reshuffle his military leadership, replacing him as the commander of Russia’s Eastern Military District.