Saturday January 21, 2023 | 11:00 a.m.
Two people have died and three more have been injured when a Russian projectile hit a multi-storey building in the city of Bakhmut, in the Ukrainian province of Donetsk, Ukrainian authorities have reported.
The military governor of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Kirilenko, has reported this attack and others that have caused the death of a third person on his Telegram account. “In just one day the Russians have killed three residents of the Donetsk region and wounded four others,” he said.
Specifically, Kirilenko has mentioned Russian attacks against Konstiantinivka, Niu York, Avdiivka and Soledar that have caused damage to six buildings of various heights, two private homes and a commercial warehouse.
“In Niu York there are three damaged houses and in Konstiantinivka two rockets have hit, one in a kindergarten and another in a university,” he explained. “The shelling continues on Torski and Zarichni and also on Siversk, although there are no casualties,” he stressed.
Donetsk has resisted, so the Russian army has increased its manpower and resources around Bakhmut.
Taking Bakhmut would cut off Ukrainian supply routes and open an avenue for Russian forces to push towards Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, two key Ukrainian strongholds in Donetsk.
Like Mariupol and other disputed cities, Bakhmut has suffered a long siege and spent weeks without running water or electricity even before Moscow launched massive attacks on public infrastructure across Ukraine.
Dnirpo
In the brutal Russian shelling of Dnipro last weekend, 45 people were killed, including six children, according to the region’s governor, Valentin Reznichenko.
The attack, which the Ukrainian presidency says vandalized more than 200 apartments, is one of the deadliest to target civilians since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, 2022. The Kremlin denies its forces were behind the bombing.
The intentional attack against the civilian population, such as the deliberate bombing of a residential building, is a war crime.
The Zelensky government, Western powers and human rights organizations accuse Putin’s troops of having committed at least 22 of the crimes and serious violations of the laws and customs applicable in international armed conflicts that appear in article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The most repeated crime is the deliberate attack against the civilian population.
overall indecision
The main Ukrainian presidential adviser Mikhailo Podoliak has criticized this Saturday the “global indecision” in the delivery of weapons to defeat the Russian invasion, referring, for example, to the doubts expressed by countries such as Germany when delivering Leopard tanks to the Ukrainian army.
“Today’s indecision is killing more and more of our people. Every day of delay means the death of Ukrainians. Think faster ”, Podoliak asked on his Twitter account.
The presidential adviser, in a message that he characterized as an “epilogue to global indecision”, estimates that the international community “will end up giving Ukraine the necessary weapons” and will realize that “there is no other option to end the war more than the defeat of Russia.”
