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.
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“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.
‘Russian terror’
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday urged Kyiv’s partners to give him more scope to use Western-supplied weapons against targets inside Russia.
“In just one week, Russia has used over 800 guided aerial bombs, nearly 300 Shahed drones, and more than 60 missiles of various types against our people,” he said in a Facebook post.
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“Terror can only be reliably stopped in one way: by striking Russian military airfields, their bases, and the logistics of Russian terror,” he said.
Officials in the central city of Poltava on Sunday said the death toll from a strike on a military education facility last week had risen to 58, after three who were wounded in the attack succumbed to their injuries.
Russian strikes also killed seven in the western city of Lviv last week, a relatively rare deadly strike on the city hundreds of kilometres from the frontlines and close to Ukraine’s borders with EU and NATO members.
Kyiv has for months been calling for the West to supply longer-range missiles and lift restrictions that limit their use to the direct combat zone.
Ukraine’s SBU security services said Saturday they had struck an ammunition depot in Russia’s Voronezh region in a drone attack.
Kyiv has also carried out a string of drone hits on Russian oil depots and refineries, including some hundreds of kilometres behind the front lines.
Seeking the ability to use more effective Western-supplied missiles for its aerial campaign, Kyiv says such sites are legitimate targets as they provide fuel for Russia’s military and are a key source of revenue for the Russian state.
“A country that defends itself against aggression in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter cannot be restricted in its defense,” Ukraine’s newly appointed foreign minister Andriy Sybiga said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
“International law allows Ukraine to strike legitimate military targets on Russia’s territory,” he added.
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