Russian forces bombed a shopping center in kyiv and, for the first time in 26 days of war, houses in Odessa, two strategic points on the map of the Russian offensive next to Mariúpol, a port city that he unsuccessfully tried to force to surrender after more than two weeks of siege.
In the capital, At least eight people were killed in a bombing last night of a shopping center that also destroyed six homes in the Podilsk district, where there are two schools and two kindergartens.Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Telegram.
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said the mall served as a warehouse for rocket launchers and ammunition, and was inoperative, so it was destroyed by “high-precision long-range weapons.”
Klitschko He subsequently decreed a 35-hour curfew in the capital and its metropolitan area.
kyiv, the main objective
Despite the lack of progress, kyiv remains Russia’s “main military target”indicated today the British Ministry of Defense, which affirmed that the bulk of the Russian troops have stalled more than 25 kilometers from the capital.
On the southeast and south flank, the Russian naval forces continue “blockading the Ukrainian coast and launching missile strikes against Ukrainian targets”according to British military intelligence.
Control of the Ukrainian coast is essential for Russia in its goal of establishing a land corridor from Donbas to the annexed Crimean peninsula, passing through Mariupol (Sea of Azov).
This Monday the landing ship “Orsk”, of the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Navy, docked in the port of Berdyansk, a city controlled by Russia and only 77 kilometers from Mariupol.
He arrived with a load of war equipment to reinforce the Russian military group.
Attacks in Odessa
This Monday, for the first time so far in the war, the strategic port city of Odessa – 990,000 inhabitants-, suffered shelling of residential buildings with artillery fired from the sea, the Mayor’s Office said on Telegram.
“They are residential buildings where civilians live. Let the alienated Russians know, to whom the leaders of their country tell them that nothing of this happens here, “said the mayor, Gennady Trukhanov.
“We will not leave Odessa and we will fight for our city,” he stressed.
So far the Odessa region has suffered missile attacks from Russian ships near Tuzla, west of the besieged city, damaging critical infrastructure but not homes.
Force surrender at Mariupol
In Mariupol, where Russia said on Friday that Donetsk separatist militias are fighting Ukrainian “nationalists” in the city, Russia tried today to force the Ukrainian Army to surrender.
The Russian Defense Ministry gave Ukrainian forces and “foreign mercenaries” two hours on Monday to leave the city without weapons or ammunition, after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s adviser Oleksiy Arestovych admitted that Ukraine has no possibility of sending reinforcements.
The unsuccessful attempt came even when the leader of the Donetsk separatists, Denis Pushilin, considered today that the taking of the city “is not a matter of two or three days, not even a week.”
The Minister for the Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories of Ukraine, Iryna Vereshchuk, rejected a surrender, and replied to Russia that “instead of wasting time on 8 pages of letters, just open a humanitarian corridor”.
According to Vereshchuk, so far 45,000 people have managed to leave the besieged city, where some 350,000 citizens are still trying to survive the siege without electricity, heating and water.
The The Red Cross said today that it still does not have access to the Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
The commander of the Azov regiment, created in 2014 in Mariupol, Denis Prokopenko, told CNN that the number of civilians killed in the city so far in the war amounts to more than 3,000. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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