KYIV: Russia on Sunday said its forces had advanced in eastern Ukraine as Kyiv reported deadly air attacks and urged the West to allow it to carry out more retaliatory strikes inside Russia’s borders. Moscow has upped its aerial attacks in recent weeks at the same time it tries to fight off a major Ukrainian cross-border offensive into its Western Kursk region that has reshaped the course of the two-and-a-half-year war. Two people were killed on Sunday in a Russian air strike on the Ukrainian city of Sumy, the capital of the region from where Ukraine poured troops and tanks across the border into Russia in its shock counter-attack.
“As a result of the air strike, two people died. Four more people were injured, including two children,” Sumy military authorities in the region said in a statement. A Russian rocket strike on a village close to the front line in the Donetsk region also killed two people, the regional prosecutor’s office said Sunday.
“Two local women aged 43 and 53 died as a result of cluster munitions” hitting their gardens, it said in a statement. Kyiv launched its Kursk offensive on August 6 hoping to force Russia to redeploy troops currently pressing forward in the east of the country. But Moscow has appeared to intensify its attacks there, chalking up its most significant territorial gains in almost two years over the month of August. Its military claimed Sunday to have captured another small village as it advances towards the key logistics hub of Pokrovsk in the eastern Donetsk region. The defence ministry in Moscow said its troops had “liberated the settlement of Novohrodivka,” which lies around 20 kilometres (12 miles) from Pokrovsk. The town is one of Russia’s larger territorial conquests of recent weeks, home to more than 14,000 inhabitants before Moscow launched its full-scale offensive in February 2022.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday said his main aim in Ukraine after 30 months of fighting was to capture the eastern Donbas area — which includes Donetsk — and claimed that Ukraine’s Kursk counter-offensive had made that easier. In the meanwhile, a Russian air strike on the Ukrainian border city of Sumy killed two people and wounded several others early Sunday, the region’s military administration said. “As a result of the air strike, two people died, (and) four more people were injured, including two children,” military authorities said in a statement. “Necessary medical assistance is provided to the wounded.”
The city’s mayor, Oleksiy Drozdenko, said homes and vehicles were also destroyed.
“All services are on site,” he said in a Telegram post.
Sumy lies just across the border from Russia’s Kursk region, where Kyiv launched a shock offensive on August 6, aimed in part at creating a “buffer zone” inside Russia.
Sunday’s strike came just over a week after another fatal attack in the city that killed two people and wounded eight others.
Regional authorities said at the time that people in 183 Sumy settlements near the Russian border were being urged to evacuate, and that tens of thousands of others in the area had already done so.__The Nation
