Artillery fire in the town of Shiroka Blaka, on the banks of the Dnieper River, killed a family – a father, a mother, a 12-year-old boy and a 23-day-old baby – and another neighbour.
Two men were killed in the neighboring town of Stanislav, where a woman was also injured.
The attack in Kherson province came after Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar tried on Saturday to quell rumors that Ukrainian forces had landed on the occupied left (east) bank of the Dnieper river in that region.
“The uproar of experts about the left bank in the Kherson region has started again. There is no reason to get excited,” he said.
Kherson regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on Sunday that three people had been injured in Russian attacks on the province on Saturday.
Ukrainian military commanders said late Saturday that Kiev’s forces had made progress in the south, announcing advances near a major town in the southern Zaporizhia region, as well as the capture of other unannounced territories.
The Ukrainian general staff said they had been “partially successful” around the strategic area of Robotyne in the Zaporizhia area, an important point that Ukraine needs to retake in order to continue advancing south towards Melitopol.
“They are liberated territories. The defense forces are working,” General Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, commander of Ukraine’s southern forces, said of the southern front.
Battles have raged at various points along the 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front in recent weeks amid a Ukrainian counteroffensive, using Western weapons and Western-trained troops against Russian forces that invaded the country nearly 18 months ago.
Ukrainian troops have made only small advances since they launched the counteroffensive in early June.
In Russia, local authorities said on Sunday that anti-aircraft defenses had shot down three drones over the Belgorod region and one in the neighboring Kursk region, both bordering Ukraine.
Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian border regions have become quite common. Drone strikes in the heart of Russian territory have been on the rise since a drone was destroyed over the Kremlin in early May. Attacks on Moscow and Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, a move that most of the world considers illegal, have increased in recent weeks.
Sending drones against Russia after more than 17 months of war seems to have little military value for Ukraine, although the strategy has served to make the Russians uneasy about taking the consequences of the conflict on their turf.
The Wagner mercenary group has played a role in the Russian military campaign, but there is a “realistic possibility” that the Kremlin is no longer funding them, according to British defense officials.
In its latest intelligence report, the Defense Ministry said it believes that Wagner is “probably heading towards a process of downsizing and reconfiguration” to save costs, and that the Kremlin has “acted against other business interests” of Wagner’s boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin. . The officials estimated that the Belarusian authorities were the “second most plausible payers”.
Thousands of Wagner fighters arrived in Belarus, a country allied to Russia, as part of a deal that ended their armed rebellion in late June and allowed them and Prigozhin to avoid criminal charges.
FOUNTAIN: Associated Press
