On Tuesday, July 19, at least one person was killed and six others were injured in a strike in the center of Kramatorsk, the major city under kyiv control in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine, whose Russian forces want to take over. The missile fell in the late morning in a small garden surrounded by bars of four-story buildings, right in the city center.
A seriously injured man, his head bleeding and wrapped in a carpet by neighbors, was lying on the ground, before being taken away by the emergency services. Firefighters were busy putting out the fire burning on two floors of one of the buildings, all the windows of which were blown out. A slightly injured woman, her leg in blood hit by shards of glass, was receiving first aid, sitting on a bench. Kramatorsk, a city of 150,000 inhabitants before the war, is the administrative center of the part of the Donetsk region in the hands of kyiv. Located about twenty kilometers from the front, it is regularly hit by gunfire.
On Monday, six people were killed in a bombardment in Toretsk, eastern Ukraine, where Moscow appears to be stepping up operations as the European Union prepares the ground for new sanctions. Russia has announced that it has officially ended the "operational pause" of its army decreed eight days ago and the bombardments have resumed with more intensity in the Donbass, an industrial region already partly controlled since 2014 by pro-Russian separatists .
The war in Ukraine will enter its sixth month on July 24 and there is no overall civilian casualty toll from the conflict so far. The successive measures adopted so far have isolated and hit Russia hard economically, without causing it to retreat. Food prices around the world have soared because of the war in Ukraine, a crucial exporter of wheat. Millions of tons of grain are blocked in Ukrainian ports by the presence of Russian warships and that of mines, placed by kyiv to defend its coasts.
