A series of explosions rocked the eastern Ukraine city of Kharkov early Saturday morning, sending towering plumes of lighting smoke into the sky and triggering a series of secondary explosions.
There were no immediate reports of casualties.
The explosion comes hours after Russia concentrated its attacks on an increasingly difficult Ukraine invasion into an area it had illegally annexed, and the death toll from a previous missile strike on apartments in the southern city of Zaporizhia rises to 14. did.
Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said in a Telegram that the early morning explosion was the result of a missile strike in the center of the city. He said the blast caused fires at one of the city’s medical facilities and a non-residential building.
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In a rebuke to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his presidency for causing Europe’s worst armed conflict since World War II, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has called on Putin, Ukrainian human rights groups, and Russia’s ally, Belarus. awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to an activist imprisoned in
Commission chair Berit Rice-Andersen said the honor went to “three outstanding defenders of human rights, democracy and peaceful coexistence.”
Putin this week illegally claimed four regions of Ukraine as Russian territory, including the Zaporizhia region, home to Europe’s largest nuclear power plant.
Fighting near the Russian-occupied Zaporizhia nuclear power plant has alerted the UN nuclear watchdog, and on Friday the number of inspectors monitoring the plant’s safety equipment dropped to four. Doubled. Ukraine’s Minister of Environmental Protection Ruslan Strilets said on Friday that an accident there could release 10 times more potentially deadly radiation than the world’s worst nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, Ukraine, 36 years ago. Stated.
“The conditions of occupation, shelling and mining of the Chernobyl and Zaporizhia nuclear power plants by Russian forces have consequences of a global character,” Strylets told the Associated Press.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN watchdog, said on Twitter on Friday that external power had been cut off again at one of Zaporizhia’s shutdown reactors, requiring the use of emergency backup diesel generators to run safety systems. and reported further problems at the power plant.
The city of Zaporizhia is 53 kilometers (33 miles) from the nuclear power plant, crowed, and under Ukrainian control. To cement Russia’s claim to the region, Russian forces bombarded the city with his S-300 missiles on Thursday, with further attacks reported on Friday.
Ukrainian officials said the death toll from a strike on an apartment building rose to 14 on Friday, while 12 people injured in the bombing remained hospitalized.
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Missiles also hit the city overnight, injuring one person, said Zaporizhia governor Oleksandr Starov. Russia also used Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones for the first time, damaging two infrastructure installations, he said.
As Ukrainian forces counterattacked in the south and east, Russia deployed unmanned Iranian-made expendable drones. These drones are cheaper and less sophisticated than missiles, but can still damage ground targets.
The Washington-based War Research Institute said Russia’s use of explosive-laden drones was unlikely to affect the course of the war.
Think tank analysts said, “They use many drones against civilian targets in rear areas, possibly hoping to create a non-linear effect through terrorism. Such efforts have been successful. No,” he writes.
Elsewhere in Moscow’s annexed areas, the Russian Defense Ministry reported Friday that Russian forces repulsed an advance of Ukrainian forces near the city of Lyman and recaptured three villages in the eastern Donetsk region. The ministry also claimed that Russian forces had blocked the advance of Ukrainian troops into several villages in the southern Kherson region.
Ukrainian President Volodymur Zelensky said in a video speech on Friday night that this week alone, his army has expanded to 29 territories, including 776 square kilometers (300 sq miles) of territory in the east and six in the Luhansk region that Putin has annexed. He said he had recaptured the settlement. In total, Ukrainian forces have liberated 2,434 square kilometers (940 square miles) of land and his 96 settlements since the start of the counteroffensive, he said.
In the Dnipropetrovsk region of Ukraine, Russian forces shelled the city of Nikopol overnight, killing one person, injuring another, and damaging buildings, natural gas pipelines and the power system, the governor said. It is located on the Dnieper River and across from the Russian-controlled area near the nuclear power plant. The city has been under frequent shelling for weeks.
On Friday, traces of Russian devastation and death became clearer from areas where Russian troops had retreated. Ukraine’s First Deputy Minister of the Interior Yevhen Yenin reported that since September 7, 530 civilian bodies have been found in the Kharkiv region of northeastern Ukraine.
Residents killed during the Russian occupation include 257 men, 225 women and 19 children, 29 of whom are unidentified, Yenin said. Most of the bodies were found in a previously uncovered mass grave in Izium City.
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According to Yening, the recovered corpses showed signs of gunshots, explosions and torture. Some had ropes around their necks, hands tied behind their backs, bullet wounds in their knees, and broken ribs.
Authorities have identified 22 torture sites in parts of the Kharkiv region recently liberated by Ukrainian forces, said regional police officer Serhiy Bolvinov.
In the recently recaptured Lyman, workers found 200 individual graves and mass graves with an unknown number of victims, Donetsk governor Pablo Kirilenko told Telegram. From Lyman he was 24 km (15 mi) away at Sviatohirsk, where the remains of 21 civilians were buried.
Meanwhile, Russian military equipment and weapons are in Ukrainian hands. The UK Defense Ministry said on Friday that Ukrainian forces had captured at least 440 tanks and about 650 armored vehicles since the Russian invasion began on February 24.
“The Russian crew’s failure to destroy intact equipment before withdrawing or surrendering highlights their poor training and poor combat discipline,” the UK Foreign Office said. “Russian formations are under serious strain in several sectors, and with unit morale declining more and more, Russia is likely to continue to lose heavy weapons.”
Putin last month ordered the partial mobilization of Russian military reserves to bolster Ukraine’s frontline personnel. But the military call-up was not without its flaws, and tens of thousands of men fled Russia, unwilling to fight Putin’s war.
This makes Russia desperate for military reinforcements. The Ukrainian military said on Friday that 500 former criminals had been mobilized to strengthen Russian forces in the eastern Donetsk region where Ukrainian forces had retaken territory. Law enforcement officers are commanding new units, the military said.
Russia’s state-run news agency TASS reported Friday that a court in the Russian city of Penza has dismissed the first lawsuit against a Russian man who was summoned but refused. He argued that the law applied only to draft evaders and not to those subject to partial mobilization.
In another sign of trouble, reports have surfaced that the new Russian army is poorly trained and undersupplied. At least two of his cities in Russia, St. Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod, announced on Friday that they would cancel Russian New Year and Christmas celebrations and use the money to buy supplies for the Russian army.
Under mounting pressure from his supporters and critics, Putin has continued to reorganize military leadership and replace the commander of Russia’s Eastern Military District.