Ukrainian servicemen fire a mortar toward Russian positions
(Picture: via REUTERS)At least ten Ukrainian civilians were killed and 20 injured after Russia unleashed a barrage of missile strikes on Friday.
Regional officials said towns and villages in the east and south that are within reach of the Russian artillery suffered most. Six people died in the Donetsk region, two in Kherson, and two in the Kharkiv region.
Donetsk Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said the Russian military used fiercely-burning phosphorus munitions in its shelling of the village of Zvanivka, about 20 kilometers north of Bakhmut, a city that has become the focus of a gruelling standoff in recent months.
The shelling also damaged apartment buildings and two schools in the nearby town of Vuhledar, Kyrylenko said.
The governor of the neighbouring Luhansk region, Serhii Haidai, said Ukrainian shelling hit two Russian bases in the occupied towns of Kreminna and Rubizhne, killing and wounding “dozens” of Russian soldiers.
Further south, Russian troops resumed shelling the town of Nikopol, across the river Dnieper from the Russia-held Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, damaging apartment buildings, gas pipelines, power lines and a bakery, officials said.
The bombardment followed announcements by the United States and Germany of plans to ship powerful tanks to help Ukraine defend itself. Other Western countries said they also would share modern tanks from their stockpiles.
Moscow has bristled at the move, and accused Western nations of entering a new level of confrontation with Russia.
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 from 1994 to 2001 as a modernized version of the Soviet-era T-72M1.
He said those deliveries would come on top of Poland’s plans to send 14 of its Leopard 2s, after Berlin approved other allies sending the German-made tanks to Ukraine.
On Friday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the supply of Western tanks to Ukraine would not change the situation in Kyiv’s favour, but rather “bring the countries of the West to a new level of confrontation with our country and our people.”
