After four and a half months of war in Ukraine, the Russian army continues its “relentless” bombardment of Donetsk, while the US pledged on Friday to offer new military aid to Kyiv.
“The entire front line is being shelled non-stop,” Donetsk governor Pavlo Kirilenko said last night. “They don’t stop bombing Donetsk (…) Bakhmut is being bombarded, Sloviansk, Kramatorsk are being bombarded day and night,” he wrote on Telegram.
Earlier yesterday, Kirilenko said that six people had been killed and 21 wounded in the past 24 hours from shelling in the area.
According to him, the Russian army “has begun to reorganize or rather to reconfigure its groups and is preparing for new actions in Sloviansk, Kramatorsk and Bakhmut.”
In the region of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, four people were killed and nine wounded in the past 24 hours, Governor Oleg Sinegubov said.
In the meantime, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk called on civilians in the Russian-occupied regions of Kherson and Zaporizhia to evacuate.
“Please leave. Our army will begin the recapture of these areas. Our determination is absolute, and it will be difficult to open humanitarian corridors later,” Vereschuk emphasized.
For his part, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky yesterday visited areas on the front and near it, as well as a hospital in Dnipro where wounded soldiers are being treated. He also toured the defense lines in Dnipropetrovsk and Kryvyi Rih.
A senior Pentagon official also said the new $400m in US military aid to Ukraine – which includes four Himars multiple rocket launcher systems and 155mm howitzers – will improve the Ukrainian military’s ability to target weapons caches and Russian supply lines.
In total, Washington has so far provided $6.9 billion in military aid to Kyiv since the beginning of the Russian invasion.
“Crop Destruction”
By bombing the Donetsk region, Moscow is trying to capture the entire Donbass valley, which is its strategic goal.
According to the regional governor, the Russian army has started to set fire to the crops: “There are huge fires in the fields which the enemy deliberately causes. They are trying to destroy the crops by any means. They are bombing agricultural machinery, harvesters,” he complained.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a country considered the world’s breadbasket, has caused food prices to skyrocket and contributed to rising inflation worldwide.
Yesterday the foreign ministers of the Group of 20 (G20) meeting in Indonesia “expressed their deep concern about the humanitarian impact of the war” in Ukraine, as the head of Indonesian diplomacy Retno Marsudi said.
The effects of the war “are felt worldwide in food, energy and budgets”, he underlined. “And as always poor and developing countries are hit the hardest.”
Although the G20 did not unanimously condemn the Russian invasion, Westerners appreciated that they managed to widen the front against Russia and clearly lay on it the responsibility for the war and the food and energy crisis it caused.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov walked out mid-day from the meeting, which was also attended by his US counterpart Anthony Blinken.
It was the first time since the start of the war in February that the two men had met in the same meeting, but Blinken refused to meet separately with Lavrov. The Russian minister replied that Moscow is not running behind Washington asking for talks.
Source: Capital
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