Today, Wednesday, the Russian military operation in Ukraine enters its 63rd day, while the Russian army continues Destruction of Ukrainian military sites and liberation of Donbass Southeast Ukraine.
In the latest development, the mayor of Mariupol announced that 20,000 civilians had been killed since the start of the Russian military operation, adding that Ukraine had turned into a shield to protect democratic Europe once morest modern fascism.
On the ground, an assistant to the mayor of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol said that Russian forces attacked today, Wednesday, the Azovstal steel factory where fighters and some civilians are holed up in the southern city, adding that no agreements were reached regarding an attempt to evacuate civilians from Mariupol today.
For its part, the Russian Defense Ministry said that its Kalibr missiles hit an arms depot in the Zaporizhia region of Ukraine that includes weapons from the United States and European countries, adding that its air forces destroyed 59 Ukrainian military targets last night.
Before that, the Ukrainian army announced that Russian forces had captured several villages in the eastern regions, as part of the operation Moscow was implementing to control the Donbass region. The Defense Ministry stated that Russian forces drove the Ukrainian army out of Velika Komishovakha and Zavody in the Kharkiv region and took control of Zarechny and Novotoshkivsk in the Donetsk region.
Britain’s Ministry of Defense said Ukraine still controlled most of its airspace, adding that Russia had failed to effectively destroy the country’s air force or curb its air defences.
“Russia has very limited air access to northern and western Ukraine, which limits offensive operations to deep strikes” with remote-delivered weapons, she added on Twitter, adding that “Russian air activity is mainly concentrated in southern and eastern Ukraine and provides support to the forces Russian wilderness.
Britain’s military intelligence said in the daily update that Russia continues to target Ukrainian military assets and logistical infrastructure nationwide, citing a high risk of civilian casualties, and saying that most of the Russian air strikes in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol were likely using unguided bombs.
In the latest developments, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that the Ukrainian Nazis were preparing new fabrications by targeting civilians in Nikolaev, southern Ukraine, with remote-detonated bombs, accusing the Russian army.
“The Nazis in Nikolaev prepared a complex provocation aimed at inflicting a lot of civilian casualties … in the small Korapilny district near the Nikolaev aircraft repair facility along Znamenskaya Street, the neo-Nazis prepared controlled explosive devices,” said the head of the Russian National Defense Monitoring Center, Lieutenant-General Mikhail Mezintsev. From a distance, they plan to detonate it in a mass gathering of civilians and accuse the Russian military.”
He pointed out that these are additional fabrications that the West and Kiev are seeking to spread widely through Western media and promote them as “Russian atrocities.”
This comes as the governor of the Russian Belgorod region, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said that a series of explosions resounded in the early hours of Wednesday morning in the city of Belgorod, near the border with Ukraine, and that a fire broke out in an ammunition depot in the region.
Gladkov said the fire, which broke out at a facility near the village of Staraya Nelidovka, did not cause any civilian casualties.
Russia accused Ukraine this month of attacking a fuel depot in Belgorod with helicopters and opening fire on several villages in the area.
The Belgorod region borders Ukraine’s Lugansk, Sumy and Kharkiv regions, all of which have seen heavy fighting since Russia invaded Ukraine two months ago.
On the ground, the Interfax news agency quoted the Russian Ministry of Defense as saying that: Its forces captured the entire Kherson region in southern Ukraine.
The agency quoted a senior official as saying that Russian forces managed, in other regions, to seize parts of the Zaporizhia and Mykolaiv regions, as well as parts of the Kharkiv region, east of Kyiv.
