A fresh barrage of Russian airstrikes killed at least 10 Ukrainian civilians and injured 20 others in one day, Ukraine’s president’s office said Friday as the country worked to recover from an earlier wave of Russian missile and drone strikes. .
Regional officials said towns and villages in the east and south that are within range of Russian artillery suffered the most. Six people died in the Donetsk region, two in Kherson and two in the Kharkiv region. A day earlier, missiles and self-propelled drones fired by Russian forces drove deeper into Ukrainian territory, killing at least 11 people.
The shelling followed announcements by the United States and Germany of plans to send powerful tanks to help Ukraine defend itself. Other Western countries said they would also share modern tanks from their reserves.
Moscow has been angry with the move and accused Western nations of entering a new level of confrontation with Russia.
UKRAINE TRIGGERS ALARMS THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY IN THE MIDDLE OF RUSSIAN DRONES ATTACKS; WESTERN TANKS TRAINING TO START
A destroyed Russian tank is seen on display as the Russia-Ukraine war approaches its one-year anniversary in Kyiv, Ukraine, on January 26, 2023.
(Danylo Antoniuk/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Donetsk Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said the Russian military used fierce-burning phosphorous ammunition in the shelling of the village of Zvanivka, some 20 kilometers north of Bakhmut, a town that has become the focus of a clash. exhausting in recent months. The shelling also damaged apartment buildings and two schools in the nearby town of Vuhledar, Kyrylenko said.
The governor of the neighboring Luhansk region, Serhii Haidai, said Ukrainian shelling hit two Russian bases in the occupied cities of Kreminna and Rubizhne, killing and wounding “dozens” of Russian soldiers. His claim could not be independently verified.
Further south, Russian troops resumed shelling the city of Nikopol, across the Dnieper River from the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, damaging apartment buildings, gas pipelines, power lines and a bakery. authorities said.
Separately, Russian authorities on Friday took new steps in their months-long and widely criticized effort to graft four Ukrainian provinces onto Russia’s already vast territory. They said the illegally annexed provinces would switch from the time zone that Kyiv covers to that of Moscow.
The change in the southern and eastern regions of Ukraine that Russia declared as part of its territory four months ago – Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – will take place “in the near future”, the Russian Ministry of Industry and Trade said. The move comes as part of what the ministry called the “gradual synchronization” of Russian law after the “admission of the four issues.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s highly orchestrated announcement of the illegal annexations came despite widespread international condemnation and the fact that Russia did not fully control the areas it annexed. Russia claims to control almost all of Luhansk and about half of Donetsk.
Less than a month and a half after the annexations, Russia lost control of the city of Kherson and wide swaths of the surrounding territory after a Ukrainian counter-offensive. Kherson was the only regional capital Russia has captured since its invasion began on February 24, and its loss dealt a heavy blow to the Kremlin.
Planned Western deployments of modern tanks to Ukraine lingered on many minds on Friday.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told Canada’s CTV that his country was ready to send 60 modern tanks, half of them the PT-91 model, which was built in Poland between 1994 and 2001 as a modernized version of the T-72M1 from the soviet era. He said those deliveries would add to Poland’s plans to send 14 of its Leopard 2s, after Berlin approved other allies to send the German-made tanks to Ukraine.
RUSSIA REACTS TO US, GERMANY DELIVERIES TANKS TO UKRAINE: ‘DIRECT PARTICIPATION IN THE CONFLICT’
People gather at a metro station being used as a bomb shelter during a rocket attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, Thursday, January 26, 2023.
(AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
On Friday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that the supply of Western tanks to Ukraine would not turn the situation in Kyiv’s favor, but would “bring Western countries to a new level of confrontation with our country and our people.”
The German government insisted on Friday that it does not see itself in direct conflict with Russia, after Moscow seized on comments by the top German diplomat this week that suggested otherwise.
During a debate Tuesday with lawmakers at the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, Foreign Minister Annelena Baerbock said it was important for European countries to avoid a “blame game” when it comes to discussing support for Ukraine.” because we are fighting a war against Russia and not against each other.”
When asked about those comments, German government spokeswoman Christiane Hoffmann referred to a line delivered by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, telling reporters in Berlin on Friday that “the chancellor has always emphasized that NATO and Germany are not parties to this attack war of Russia against Russia.” Ukraine.”
“We support Ukraine, but we are not part of the war,” he added.
In other developments:
– German officials said the country was the target of a series of apparent Russian-origin cyberattacks this week following a decision to supply Ukraine with modern tanks. A Home Office spokeswoman said so-called denial-of-service attacks, in which entire websites or networks are bombarded with requests in an attempt to make them inaccessible, were observed on Wednesday and Thursday and “were largely combated or They didn’t have a serious impact.”
– Ukrainian air force spokesman Yurii Ihnat said Russia used its latest hypersonic Kinzhal missiles to attack power facilities in the Kyiv and Zaporizhzhia regions on Thursday. He said Ukraine lacks defenses against Kinzhal, adding that Russia has few such missiles and uses them mainly against priority targets.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
A woman walks near a residential building destroyed by a Russian missile attack in the town of Glevakha, Kyiv region, Ukraine, on January 27, 2023.
(Photo by Oleksii Chumachenko/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Ihnat said in televised remarks that Russia also used Kh-55 missiles, air-launched missiles that were designed to carry nuclear warheads, with dummy warheads to distract Ukraine’s air defenses.
– Russian state media say the state communications watchdog has restricted access to CIA and FBI websites for allegedly disseminating materials “containing inaccurate information of social importance” and “discrediting” Russia’s military. Russia. The Russian government has made it illegal to discredit its troops or spread “false information” about the military.
