Kyiv (Ukraine) (AFP) – The Kremlin said on Tuesday that it wanted to pursue peace in Ukraine hours after mounting attacks that killed at least 25 people, including a 23-year-old pregnant woman and more than a dozen prison inmates. The strikes on several regions came hours after US President Donald Trump issued Moscow with a new deadline to end its grinding invasion of Ukraine — now in its fourth year — or face tough new sanctions.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of purposefully targeting a prison in the Zaporizhzhia region — that Russia claims as its own — killing 16 people and wounding more than 40 others. “It was a deliberate strike, intentional, not accidental. The Russians could not have been unaware that they were targeting civilians in that facility,” Zelensky said on social media in response. The Kremlin denied that claim. “The Russian army does not strike civilian targets,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, including from AFP. Peskov added that Moscow had “taken note” of Trump’s new deadline and told journalists that it remained “committed to the peace process to resolve the conflict around Ukraine and secure our interests.”
Ukraine’s justice ministry said Moscow’s forces hit the prison with four glide bombs, while police said 16 inmates were killed and 43 were wounded. Bricks and debris were strewn on the ground around buildings with blown-out windows, according to images released by the ministry. The facility’s perimeter was intact and there was no threat that inmates would escape, it added. Rescue workers were seen searching for survivors in pictures released by the region’s emergency services. A senior Ukrainian source said that 274 people were serving sentences in the Bilenkivska facility, where 30 people worked. The source added there were no Russian war prisoners being held at the centre. Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said the Zaporizhzhia attack was further evidence of Russian “war crimes.” “People held in places of detention do not lose their right to life and protection,” he wrote on social media.
In addition to the glide bomb attack, the Ukrainian air force said that Russia had launched 37 drones and two missiles overnight, adding that its air defence systems had downed 32 of the drones. Zelensky said that among the separate attacks, Russian forces had targeted a hospital in the town of Kamyanske in the Dnipropetrovsk region. “Three people were killed in the attack, including a pregnant woman. Her name was Diana. She was only 23 years old,” Zelensky said. Separate strikes in the eastern Kharkiv region that borders Russia killed six people, regional authorities said. In the southern Russian region of Rostov, a Ukrainian drone attack killed one person, the region’s acting governor said.
Kyiv has been trying to repel Russia’s summer offensive, which has made fresh advances into areas largely spared since the start of the invasion in 2022. The Russian defence ministry claimed fresh advances across the sprawling front line on Tuesday, saying its forces had taken control of two more villages — one in the Donetsk region, and another in the Zaporizhzhia region. The prison strike on Tuesday came on the three-year anniversary of an attack on another detention facility in occupied Ukrainian territory that Kyiv blamed on Moscow, which was reported to have killed dozens of captured Ukrainian soldiers.
Ukraine and Russia blamed each other for the strike over the night of July 29 three years ago on the detention centre in the Russian-occupied Donetsk region, which the Kremlin says is part of Russia. Ukraine says that dozens of its soldiers who laid down their arms after a long Russian siege of the port city of Mariupol were killed in that attack on the Olenivka detention facility.
© 2024 AFP
