Reuters/Anna Voitenko
By Reuters
Ukraine is seeing “significant results” from U.S. and German air defence systems, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Sunday, despite waves of Russian air strikes that included a hit on a blood transfusion centre.
Russia reported that it had shot down a drone heading for Moscow in the third such attack in a week, while officials on both sides said that Ukraine had struck two bridges linking Crimea to the mainland.
Both countries have stepped up attacks on each other’s troops, weaponry and infrastructure supporting the war as Ukraine seeks to dislodge Russian forces who have dug in across southern and eastern Ukraine since their invasion last year.
The Moscow-appointed head of Crimea said the Chonhar bridge to the peninsula, which was annexed from Ukraine by Moscow in 2014, had been damaged by a missile strike. Another of the three road links between Crimea and Russian-occupied parts of mainland Ukraine, near the town of Henichesk, was shelled and a civilian driver wounded, a Moscow-appointed official said.
Traffic was halted on a third bridge, linking Russia to Crimea, after both sides said a Ukrainian naval drone full of explosives struck a Russian fuel tanker vessel overnight from Friday to Saturday, the second such attack in 24 hours.
In his nightly video address on Sunday, Zelenskiy said advanced air defence systems, including the U.S.-built Patriot and Germany’s IRIS-T, were proving “highly effective” and had “already yielded significant results”.
Zelenskiy said Ukraine had shot down “a significant part” of Russia’s attacks over the past week, including 65 missiles of various kinds, and 178 assault drones, including 87 Shaheds.
In Russia, Moscow’s Vnukovo airport suspended flights on Sunday, citing unspecified reasons outside its control. Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin said a drone had been shot down south of the capital.
At least 10 Russian missiles appear to have got through Ukraine’s air defences in the overnight attack, which Ukraine’s air force said involved 70 air assault weapons including cruise and hypersonic missiles as well as Iranian-made drones.
Local media said a worker at a grain silo had been wounded and a rescuer died during a rescue operation.
The attacks followed what Zelenskiy said was a bomb attack on a blood transfusion centre in the town of Kupiansk, around 16 km (10 miles) from the front in the eastern Kharkiv region.
“There are dead and wounded,” he said on his Telegram channel, describing the strike as a “war crime”.
He did not say how many casualties there were or whether they were military or civilian. Reuters could not immediately verify the report.
MASSIVE CASUALTIES
Russia denies deliberately targeting civilians or military hospitals in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which has killed thousands of people, uprooted millions and destroyed cities.
Russia’s defence ministry said it had conducted successful strikes on Ukrainian air bases in the western Rivne and Khmelnytskyi regions and southern Zaporizhzhia region, without giving details.
The deputy governor of the Khmelnytskyi region, Serhiy Tiurin, said a military airfield in Starokostiantyniv was among the targets. He said most of the missiles were shot down, but explosions had damaged several houses, a cultural institution and the bus station and a fire had broken out at a grain silo.
Ukraine is two months into a gruelling counteroffensive to try to push out Russian forces occupying almost a fifth of its territory.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said late last month that while Ukraine had recaptured half the territory that Russia had initially seized, the Ukrainian counteroffensive was in its early days and would take shape over “several months”.
Another sea drone attack on Russia’s navy base at Novorossiysk damaged a warship on Friday, the first time the Ukrainian navy had projected its power so far from its shores.
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev suggested Moscow would launch more strikes against Ukrainian ports in response to Kyiv’s attacks on Russian ships in the Black Sea, and threatened to hand Ukraine “an ecological catastrophe”.
Zelenskiy’s aide Mykhailo Podoliak characterised the overnight Russian missile attacks as a response to Ukraine’s overtures to Global South countries that have been reluctant to take sides in a conflict that has hurt the global economy.
Senior officials from some 40 countries including the U.S., China and India held talks about the conflict in Saudi Arabia on Saturday and Sunday, but the meeting wound up with no concrete action beyond a commitment to further consultations, according to a Saudi readout at the end.
The meeting was part of a diplomatic push by Ukraine to build support beyond its core Western backers. Zelenskiy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, said they had been very productive discussions but did not give details.
Russia did not attend. Its deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov said the meeting reflected the West’s “doomed efforts” to mobilise developing nations behind Zelenskiy.
Russian and international officials say there is no prospect of direct peace talks between Ukraine and Russia at present, with the war raging.