Russia Launches Huge Drone Attack On Ukraine
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
KYIV/BUDAPEST (Worthy News) – With Ukraine’s counter-offensive imminent or already underway, Russia launched massive drone and missile strikes on the war-torn country with air raid sirens sounding nationwide.
Yet the attacks did little to hide Russia’s losses on the battlefields of Europe’s most devastating armed conflict since World War Two.
About 100,000 Russian soldiers have died in the battle to capture Ukraine’s eastern city of Bakhmut, a Ukrainian general has claimed.
Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty, a spokesperson for the Eastern Group of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, said they were “rough calculations” in an interview on Ukrainian television.
He said: “I am sure that further verification will only show an increase in this number. This is natural as the enemy uses the so-called meat assaults as the main method of waging war.”
While these figures were impossible to verify, several sources have said that thousands of Russian and Ukrainian forces have died in one of the bloodiest battles in the war.
Apparently frustrated over its apparent inability to capture more territory over 14 long months after it invaded Ukraine, Russia has increased its missile and drone strikes.
Among the attacks was a Russian missile attack overnight strike that destroyed a Red Cross warehouse containing aid in Odesa, Ukraine’s
third most populous city and a major seaport and transport hub in the southwest.
AID SUSPENDED
The Odesa regional organization of the Red Cross Society said workers and volunteers were not in the 1,000 square meters complex at the time of the strike. “The provision of humanitarian aid and the activities of some projects of the Odesa Regional Organisation of the Red Cross of Ukraine have been suspended,” it added in published remarks.
However, at least five people were wounded by Russian strikes on Kyiv, city officials said Monday, just as Moscow launched another large-scale attack on Ukraine.
Three people were injured in blasts in Kyiv’s Solomyanskyi district, and two others were injured when drone wreckage fell onto the Sviatoshyn district, west of the capital’s center, mayor Vitali Klitschko said.
Russian artillery shelling also wounded eight people, including a nine-year-old boy, in two villages in Kherson, regional officials said.
Six civilians were wounded in the village of Stanislav on the right bank of the Dnipro estuary, regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said.
The attacks came as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky marked the anniversary of the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945 on Monday by saying he would formalize a day of remembrance in Ukraine on 8 May when other Western countries celebrate Europe’s victory.
But there was no time to remember those who died on Monday as the country was also confronted with nuclear danger.
OPERATIONS SUSPENDED
Operations at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, Europe’s largest, are being suspended in case of “provocations” by Ukrainian forces, the Russian state news agency TASS reported.
Moscow believes Ukraine is initiating a counteroffensive to retake Russian-held territories, including potentially in the Zaporizhzhia region. On Monday, Russian authorities began evacuating people from the area.
A total of 1,679 people, including 660 children, have been evacuated from areas near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, a Moscow-installed official in the Russia-controlled parts of the Zaporizhzhia region has said.
The head of the United Nations nuclear power watchdog, Rafael Grossi, warned that the situation around the plant has become “potentially dangerous.”
As fighting intensified, the president of the European Union’s executive European Commission was to meet the Ukrainian president in Kyiv on Tuesday, Worthy News learned.
Ursula von der Leyen will meet Zelensky while the EU could impose penalties on countries helping Moscow dodge Western sanctions as part of a drive to close loopholes in the regime of restrictions on the Russian economy, sources said.
A draft EU regulation reportedly proposes that non-EU countries could be included in future sanctions if shown to be at “particularly high risk of being used for circumvention against Russia.”
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