After Snake Island retreat, Russian missile attack kills 21 near Ukraine’s Odesa

SERHIIVKA, Ukraine, July 1 (Reuters) – Russia flattened a part of an house constructing whereas residents slept on Friday in missile assaults near Ukraine’s port of Odesa that authorities say killed at the least 21 folks, hours after Russian troops deserted the Black Sea outpost of Snake Island.

Locals within the resort village of Serhiivka helped staff choose via the rubble of the nine-storey house block, a piece of which had been fully destroyed within the early-morning strike.

Walls and home windows of a neighbouring 14-storey house block had been additionally broken by the blast wave. Nearby vacation camps had been additionally hit.

“We came here to the site, assessed the situation together with emergency workers and locals, and together helped those who survived. And those who unfortunately died. We helped to carry them away,” mentioned Oleksandr Abramov, who lives close by and had rushed to the scene when he heard the blast.

Serhiy Bratchuk, spokesman for the Odesa regional administration, mentioned 21 folks had been confirmed killed, together with a 12-year-old boy.

Among the fatalities was an worker of the Children’s Rehabilitation Center arrange by Ukraine’s neighbour Moldova within the resort. Five others had been injured.

“These peaceful people made the days of the children of Moldova more beautiful, they took care of their rehabilitation with great love and devotion,” Moldovan Health Minister Alla Nemerenko mentioned on her Facebook web page.

The regional governor mentioned the missiles had been fired from the route of the Black Sea.

The Kremlin denied focusing on civilians.

“I would like to remind you of the president’s words that the Russian Armed Forces do not work with civilian targets,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov mentioned.

The attack got here simply 4 days after Russia struck a crowded shopping center in central Ukraine, killing at the least 19 folks.

Kyiv says Moscow has escalated its long-range assaults, hitting civilian targets removed from the frontline in what Ukraine says are warfare crimes. Russia says it has been aiming at army websites.

Thousands of civilians have been killed since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. Russia calls the invasion a “special operation” to root out nationalists. Ukraine and its Western allies say it’s an unprovoked warfare of aggression.

“PUSH THEM BACK”

The strike on Serhiivka passed off shortly after Russia pulled its troops off Snake Island, a strategically vital outcrop about 140 km (85 miles) southeast of Odesa that it seized on the warfare’s first day. They had used it to regulate the northwestern Black Sea.

In his nightly video handle, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy hailed what he described as a strategic victory at Snake Island.

“It does not yet guarantee security. It does not yet ensure that the enemy will not come back,” he mentioned. “But this significantly limits the actions of the occupiers. Step by step, we will push them back from our sea, our land and our sky.”

Russia has used its management of the ocean to impose a blockade on Ukraine, one of many world’s greatest grain exporters, threatening to shatter Ukraine’s economic system and trigger world famine.

Moscow denies it’s guilty for a meals disaster, which it says is brought on by Western sanctions hurting its personal exports.

Russian President Vladimir Putin met the president of Indonesia on Thursday and spoke by telephone on Friday to the prime minister of India, promising each main meals importers that Russia would stay a giant provider of grain.

Ukraine mentioned a Russian-flagged cargo ship, the Zhibek Zholy, had left the Russian-occupied port of Berdyansk with a cargo of Ukrainian grain. Kyiv requested that Turkey detain the vessel, based on a Ukrainian official and doc seen by Reuters. learn extra

(*21*)A Russian-installed official mentioned on Thursday that after a stoppage of a number of months the primary cargo ship had left Berdyansk port however he didn’t title the Zhibek Zholy.

Ukraine has accused Russia of stealing grain from the territories that Russian forces have seized since its invasion.

The Kremlin has beforehand denied this and didn’t reply to requests for touch upon Friday.

NO GAS, ELECTRICITY, WATER

Russia’s stepped up marketing campaign of long-range missile assaults on Ukrainian cities has come as its forces have floor out success on the battlefield within the east, with a relentless assault to pressure Kyiv to cede two provinces to separatists.

Moscow has been on the verge of capturing a kind of provinces, Luhansk, since taking the town of Sievierodonetsk final week after a few of the heaviest combating of the warfare.

Ukraine’s final bastion in Luhansk is the town of Lysychansk throughout the Siverskyi Donets river, which is near being encircled below Russian artillery barrages.

The Russians had been shelling Lysychansk from completely different instructions and approaching from a number of sides, regional Governor Serhiy Gaidai mentioned on Ukrainian tv.

“The superiority in fire power of the occupiers is still very much in evidence,” Zelenskiy mentioned. “They have simply brought in all their reserves to hit us.”

In Russian-occupied Sievierodonetsk, residents emerged from basements to sift via the rubble of their metropolis.

“Almost all the city infrastructure is destroyed. We are living without gas, electricity, and water since May,” Sergei Oleinik, 65, instructed Reuters. “We are glad that this ended, and soon maybe reconstruction will start, and we will be back to more or less normal life.”

Reporting by Reuters bureaux; Writing by Peter Graff and Angus MacSwan; Editing by Nick Macfie and Rosalba O’Brien

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