Ukrainian servicemen fire a D-20 howitzer towards Russian troops at a position near the front line town of Bakhmut, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Donetsk region, Ukraine, on July 11.STRINGER/Reuters
Russia targeted the regions of Kyiv, Khmelnytskiy and Kirovohrad in a second missile strike on Ukraine Wednesday, the air force said after air-raid sirens sounded across the country.
It was not immediately clear if there was any damage. Authorities in the western Khmelnytskiy region confirmed the sound of explosions.
“We have registered high-speed targets, probably also ballistic missiles. The enemy is using different weapons types,” air force spokesman Yuriy Ihnat said in televised comments.
He said some missiles had travelled towards the city of Starokostiantyniv, which is the location of a Ukrainian military airfield. He said the missiles had taken a highly convoluted route, even making a 180-degree turn at one point.
Ukrainian air defences thwarted an earlier attack on Wednesday afternoon, shooting down two Kalibr cruise missiles over the central city of Vinnytsia that appeared to have been fired by a submarine in the Black Sea, the air force said.
The Ukrainian city divided between those who fled the invasion and those who stayed
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency claimed responsibility for the first time on Wednesday for a sabotage operation that badly damaged the Russian-made bridge linking occupied Crimea with Russia last October.
Vasyl Malyuk, head of the Security Service of Ukraine, said his agency was behind the attack, speaking in comments shown on television as he presented a commemorative postage stamp marking wartime special forces operations.
“There were many different operations, special operations. We’ll be able to speak about some of them publicly and aloud after the victory. We will not talk at all about others,” Mr. Malyuk said. “It is one of our actions, namely the destruction of the Crimean Bridge on Oct. 8 last year.”
The bridge was badly damaged in October in a powerful blast, with Russian officials saying the explosion was caused by a truck that blew up while crossing the bridge, killing three people.
The bridge was hit by a fresh attack this month, but Mr. Malyuk made no mention of who was behind that one.
The 19-kilometre Crimean Bridge over the Kerch Strait is the only direct link between the transport network of Russia and the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine and occupied in 2014.
The bridge was a flagship project for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who opened it for road traffic with great fanfare by driving a truck across in 2018.
It served as a crucial supply route for Russian forces after Moscow invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, sending forces from Crimea to seize parts of southern Ukraine’s Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.
Ukrainian troops are gradually advancing in the south and the military is about to receive a consignment of 1,700 strike and reconnaissance drones to help with the counteroffensive, officials said on Wednesday.
Hanna Maliar, the deputy defence minister, reported advances toward the southern, occupied cities of Melitopol and Berdyansk, which is on the Sea of Azov, and said Kyiv’s troops were also successfully attacking in the east on the flanks of occupied Bakhmut.
Russia, which sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in February, 2022, holds swathes of territory in the south and east. Ukraine launched a big push to recapture land this summer, but progress has been slow against entrenched Russian positions.
Ms. Maliar reported Ukrainian “successes” in the southeast, including near Staromayorske, a village near a cluster of hamlets that Ukraine recaptured in the Donetsk region this summer.
“Battles continue near Staromayorske. Our defenders have successes; they were gaining a foothold on the reached frontiers,” she said.
In the east, Ms. Maliar said Ukrainian forces continued to repel Russian advances in the direction of Kupiansk and Lyman, which Ukraine liberated last year.
Fierce fighting raged, she said, near the villages of Klishchiivka, Kurdyumivka and Andriivka on the southern flank of Bakhmut, a small city reduced to ruins in a bloody, months-long battle that gave Russian forces control of the area for now.
Despite steady Western military aid, Ukrainian military officials have said Russia still has an advantage in artillery, tanks and manpower.
Mykhailo Fedorov, a deputy prime minister, said 1,700 drones were on their way to the front lines to help the offensive.
“All of them are now going to the front to protect the lives of our soldiers, to make our artillery even more accurate, to destroy the enemy,” Mr. Fedorov said in a video that showed hundreds of drones laid out in rows on a field.
Kyiv has tried different tactics to take out Russian artillery, air defences, munition warehouses and logistic routes.
Ukrainian producers have sharply increased domestic drone production, and more than 10,000 drone operators have been already trained with another 10,000 currently receiving training, Mr. Fedorov said.
NATO said Wednesday it was stepping up surveillance of the Black Sea region as it condemned Russia’s exit from a landmark deal that allowed Ukrainian grain exports through the Black Sea.
The announcement came after a meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Council, which was launched at a NATO summit in Lithuania earlier this month to co-ordinate co-operation between the military alliance and Kyiv.
The Kremlin doubled down on terminating the grain deal by attacking Ukrainian ports and declaring wide areas of the Black Sea unsafe for shipping.
“Allies and Ukraine strongly condemned Russia’s decision to withdraw from the Black Sea grain deal and its deliberate attempts to stop Ukraine’s agricultural exports on which hundreds of millions of people worldwide depend. ... NATO and allies are stepping up surveillance and reconnaissance in the Black Sea region, including with maritime patrol aircraft and drones,” read the NATO statement.
Last week, Russia halted the breakthrough wartime deal that allowed grain to flow from Ukraine to countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia where hunger is a growing threat and high food prices have pushed more people into poverty.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Black Sea Grain Initiative would be suspended until demands to get Russian food and fertilizer to the world are met.
The NATO statement criticized Moscow’s declaration that parts of the Black Sea’s international waters were “temporarily unsafe” for navigation.
“Allies noted that Russia’s new warning area in the Black Sea, within Bulgaria’s exclusive economic zone, has created new risks for miscalculation and escalation, as well as serious impediments to freedom of navigation,” the NATO statement said.
The suspension of the Black Sea Grain Initiative marks the end of an accord that the U.N. and Turkey brokered last summer to allow shipments of food from the Black Sea region after Russia’s invasion of its neighbour worsened a global food crisis. The initiative is credited with helping reduce soaring prices of wheat, vegetable oil and other global food commodities.
Ukraine and Russia are both major global suppliers of wheat, barley, sunflower oil and other food that developing nations rely on.
With files from Associated Press