A "massive attack" of Russian missiles killed six people on Sunday in residential areas of Kostiantynivka, near Bakhmout, in eastern Ukraine, whose President Volodymyr Zelensky hailed the resistance in the face of "the greatest force against the humanity of our time".
The head of state was speaking on the occasion of the discovery a year ago of the bodies of civilians killed in Boutcha, a town near Kiev that has become a symbol of the atrocities committed by the Russians. The latter have meanwhile repeatedly denied any involvement, citing a "staging" of the Ukrainians and their allies.
This macabre anniversary came the day after Russia took over the rotating presidency of the UN Security Council, where it faces Westerners who banned it from nations after the outbreak of the invasion of the United Nations. 'Ukraine.
On the ground, fierce clashes continue around Bakhmout, which has been at the epicenter of the fighting for months.
The situation in the region "is still very tense," Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Ganna Maliar said on Sunday. “The enemy is trying to engage not only the fighters of (the paramilitary organization) Wagner but also professional paratrooper units. Excessively high manpower losses do not stop the enemy,” she added.
Russia "continues to concentrate the bulk of its efforts on the conduct of offensive actions in the sectors of Lyman, Bakhmout, Avdiïvka and Mariïnka", noted in the evening the staff of the Ukrainian army, assuring that " numerous enemy attacks" against Bakhmout were repelled on Sunday.
The same day, about 27 km from this ruined city, in Kostiantynivka, a Russian bombardment left six dead, three men and three women, and eleven wounded, announced the Ukrainian authorities.
These are "just residential areas", "ordinary civilians of an ordinary city of Donbass" who were targeted, reacted President Zelensky.
AFP journalists saw a large crater in a courtyard and shattered windows from the ground floor to the upper floors in two 14-storey buildings, while the roofs of neighboring houses were shattered.
Police say Russia carried out a 'massive attack' in the morning, six S-300 and Hurricane missile strikes
"Sixteen apartment buildings, eight private residences, a kindergarten, an administrative building, three cars and a gas pipeline" were affected in total, she said.
Lilia, a 19-year-old psychology student met outside her badly damaged apartment building with shards of glass still falling from the windows as she spoke, said she was "shocked".
"I was very lucky not to have been home at the time," she said.
Nina, a retiree, was looking at the damage done to her apartment on the ground floor of a Soviet-era building. She was also not at home when the explosions occurred.
"The interior doors and front door were blown out. An internal dividing wall broke. Not a single window remains," she explained.
Mortar fire also killed two people in the Sumy region (northeast), lamented Volodymyr Zelensky.
"These are just a few examples of the dozens of bombings every day. There is only one way to stop Russian terrorism and restore security to all our cities and communities (...). And this path is a military victory for Ukraine," he continued.
"A day will come when we will say: the last occupier fled or was killed" in the east or the south, the peninsula unilaterally annexed in 2014 by Moscow from "Crimea will be free and secure again. Ukraine will take back everything which belongs to him", concluded the Head of State.
"Ukrainian people! You have stopped the greatest force against humanity of our time. You have stopped a force that despises and wants to destroy everything that matters to people," exclaimed hours earlier. Mr. Zelensky on Telegram, a year after the discovery of numerous corpses in Boutcha following the withdrawal of the Russian military.
On April 2, 2022, AFP journalists saw the bodies of twenty men in this locality, one of whom had his hands tied behind his back, in addition to charred carcasses of vehicles and destroyed houses.
Scenes that had caused shock waves around the world.
This same Sunday, in Russia, a well-known Russian military blogger, fervent defender of the military offensive in Ukraine, was killed by "an explosive device" in a café in Saint Petersburg. Twenty-five people were injured.
"Spiders devour each other in a jar. The question of when domestic terrorism would become an instrument of domestic political struggle was only a matter of time," commented Mikhailo Podoliak, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, predicting that "trouble" will inevitably occur on Russian soil.
04/02/2023 20:42:01 - Kostiantynivka (Ukraine) (AFP) - © 2023 AFP
