Ukraine’s nuclear energy agency charged that Russia shelled the nearby communities of Nikopol and Dnipro on Saturday and stored weapons at Europe’s largest nuclear power facility.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of the war-torn country accused Moscow of wanting to inflict the greatest amount of harm more than 20 weeks after Russia invaded its neighbor, resulting in thousands of deaths and millions of displaced people in Ukraine, but he also vowed that his country would “endure” the conflict.
Up to 500 Russian soldiers were in charge of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, according to Petro Kotin, president of the Ukrainian nuclear agency Energoatom, who described the situation as “very serious.”
Although it is still run by Ukrainian employees, the facility in southeast Ukraine has been under Russian authority since the first weeks of Moscow’s invasion.
In an interview with Ukrainian television that was aired on Friday, he claimed: “The occupants bring their apparatus there, including missile systems, from which they already shell the land of Nikopol and the other bank of the river Dnipro.”
According to Valentin Reznichenko, the governor of the Dnipro region, Russian missiles fired on Saturday targeted residential buildings in the city of Nikopol and killed two persons.
Oleg Synegubov, the governor of the area around Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine, said that three people were murdered in the village of Chuguiv by a Russian missile attack the previous night.
After a woman passed away from her injuries in the hospital on Saturday, officials in the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia reported that the total number of people killed by Russian strikes now stands at 24. According to Ukraine, three kids were among the deceased.
“Sixty-eight people, including four children, continue receiving therapy. According to Sergiy Borzov, the district chief of Vinnytsia, four persons are still missing.
Brutal Strikes
Zelensky raggedly accused the Russians of conducting bombing campaigns that “maximize harm” to Ukrainian cities and pleaded for the populace to pay attention to air raid warnings.
In a speech on Saturday night, Zelensky said that Ukraine has “withstood Russia’s cruel blows,” recovered some of the territories it has lost since the war began, and will soon retake additional occupied territory.
“We’ll persevere. We’ll triumph, he assured them, and “rebuild our lives.”
Russian claims that military officials from Ukraine and foreign armament suppliers were killed in strikes in Vinnytsia, hundreds of kilometers away from the front lines of combat.
However, Ukraine said that the fatalities also included four-year-old Liza Dmitrieva, a Down’s syndrome sufferer whose passing sparked a public outcry as a video of her last moments in life went viral on social media.
After surgery, Liza’s mother is in critical condition.
Less than a week earlier, strikes on Chasiv Yar in the Donetsk region left around 50 people dead. The missile strikes on Vinnytsia were the most recent attacks to leave a significant civilian death toll.
Olga Dekanenko, a cane-wielding elderly woman, navigates the wreckage surrounding her home in Konstantinovka, an industrial village severely devastated by a Russian airstrike early on Saturday.
Dekanenko was dozing off at the time. Her compact bedroom has a view of the lawn where the rocket touched down. She awoke on the ground, surrounded by a jumble of cushions, blankets, and stones.
The 67-year-old Dekanenko tells AFP with a worn-out smile, “We’re alive, it’s a good day.”
Donbas town “Clearing”
The Group of 20 major nations’ finance ministers met for two days to discuss ways to address the food and energy issues brought on by the war, but the meeting ended without issuing a joint statement since the conflict polarised the international forum.
Coordinated attempts to address increasing inflation and food shortages will be hampered by the inability to reach a consensus on a joint communique.
Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s finance minister, said from Bali that Moscow’s attendance at the G20 summit was “like bringing an arsonist to a meeting of firefighters” and criticized it as “absurd.”
Russia and Ukraine trade blame over prison shelling https://t.co/LU8lRFCHWN
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) July 29, 2022
The industrial Donbas region in the east of Ukraine has recently seen the most intense fighting, where grueling trench fights and artillery duels are evolving into an attrition war.
After seizing control of sister cities Lysychansk and Severodonetsk, which are located around 30 kilometers to its east, Moscow-backed rebels claimed Friday that Siversk was their next objective.
Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for the Russian defense ministry, said Saturday’s attacks targeted Ukrainian soldiers in a brigade that it claimed was active in the Siversk direction.
Daniil Versonov, a representative of the Donetsk separatists, claimed that small groups of rebel fighters were “cleaning” Siversk’s eastern neighborhoods.
Ukraine has pleaded with partners on numerous occasions to give it cutting-edge, long-range precision artillery systems so it can target Russian forces farther within Ukrainian-held territory.