Russia confirmed this Friday that bombed kyiv, with “high-precision” missiles, during the visit on Thursday to the Ukrainian capital of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
Producer and journalist Vera Gyrych of the US-funded radio station Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty died in that attack after her home was hit by a missile.
The Russian Defense Ministry said it launched a “long-range, high-precision” airstrike on the workshops of the Artyom missile and space company.
Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky has urged a stronger global response to Thursday’s attack, which came after his talks with Guterres. “It’s unfortunate but such a deliberate and brutal humiliation of the United Nations by Russia has gone unanswered”, he claimed.
The first bombardment of the capital since mid-April came after Guterres visited Bucha, where dozens of bodies were found earlier this month after Russian troops withdrew, and other cities on the outskirts of kyiv.
AFP journalists saw a building on fire in a residential area, with a thick plume of black smoke escaping through broken windows. “I heard the sound of two rockets and two explosions. It was a sound similar to that of an airplane in flight and then two explosions with an interval of three or four seconds,” Oleksandr Stroganov, 34, told AFP.
More than 8,000 alleged war crimes
The UN Secretary-General condemned the kyiv attack and asked Moscow “cooperate” with the International Criminal Court in order to “establish responsibility” for the alleged crimes committed against civilians in Bucha.
Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Irina Venediktova said “more than 8,000 cases” of suspected war crimes have been identified. She also pointed out that there is an ongoing investigation against ten Russian soldiers suspected of committing atrocities in Bucha, where dozens of bodies in civilian clothes were found after the withdrawal of troops from Moscow.
The facts under investigation, according to Venediktova, include “assassinations of civilians, bombing of civilian infrastructure, torture”, as well as “sexual crimes” denounced “in the occupied territory of Ukraine”.
The spokesman for the United States Department of Defense, John Kirby, attacked the “depravity” of Russian President Vladimir Putin and questioned whether someone with an “ethical and moral sense” could justify the bombings of hospitals and the summary executions of innocents.
Hours before the bombing in kyiv, the US president Joe Biden asked Congress for $33 billion in additional aid to support Ukraine against Russian “atrocities and aggressions”. “The cost of this fight is not cheap. But giving in to aggression is going to be more costly if we allow it to happen,” he alleged.
White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the United States wants the war to end as soon as possible, but US military aid will be extended beyond October.
Bombing in Mariupol
Russia failed to take kyiv after invading Ukraine on February 24but then concentrated its troops in the east and south of the country, around the port of Mariupol in particular, while continuing to bombard western and central areas with long-range missiles.
The authorities are trying to evacuate civilians from Mariupol, trapped in the gigantic Azovstal steel plant, where the last pockets of resistance are concentrated. The Ukrainian Azov battalion indicated on Telegram that a military field hospital located in that industrial complex was bombed.
The operating room collapsed and soldiers being treated were killed or wounded, the report added, without giving a casualty count.
In the shell-damaged port area of Mariupol, AFP heard loud explosions from Azovstal on Friday during a press tour organized by the Russian army, with continuous detonations.
The Ukrainian government admitted that Russian forces have captured several towns in the Donbas region, in the East. Ukrainian forces, for their part, armed by Western powers, also claimed some victories on the front line.
A senior Pentagon official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Russian offensive is progressing slowly, “several days behind schedule” as planned. “They are far from having made the connection” between the troops that entered through the Kharkov region (east), north of that region, and those that come from the south of the country, he said.
In the Kharkiv region, the Ukrainians claimed to have recaptured Ruska Lozova, a town “important to the Russian strategy”.
So far, the conflict has forced 5.4 million Ukrainians to flee their country and more than 7.7 million have fled and are internally displaced, according to a UN estimate.