Bloodshed and tears as eastern Ukraine faces Russian attack
CHUGUIV, Ukraine — A son wept over the body of his father among the wreckage of a missile strike in a residential district in the eastern Ukrainian town of Chuguiv as the country woke up Thursday to a Russian invasion.
"I told him to leave," the man in his 30s sobbed, next to the twisted ruins of a car.
Nearby a woman screamed curses into the wintry sky.
A missile crater, some four to five metres wide, was scoured into the earth between two devastated five-storey apartment buildings. Firefighters battled to extinguish the remains of a blaze.
Several other buildings on the street were seriously damaged, their windows shattered and doorframe hanging in the frigid morning air.
It was among the first reported damage after Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine early Thursday, with explosions heard in several locations across the country in the early morning hours.
Sergiy, 67, tried to use the leg of an Ikea table to block up his smashed window. The leg stuck out into the air.
He had received a few bruises but said he was fine.
"I'm going to stay here, my daughter is in Kyiv and it's the same there," he told AFP.
In Sergiy's opinion, the missile has targeted the nearby military airfield, close to Ukraine's second city Kharkiv and just some 40 kilometres (25 miles) from the Russian border.
"It was one of the targets that Putin had cited, I'm not even surprised," he said, refusing to give his surname.
"We will hang in there."
Thick black smoke could be seen billowing from the direction of the airfield — one of a raft of strategic locations across the country pounded by Moscow's firepower in an opening barrage.
A policeman said the toll from the bombardment was still being "evaluated" without giving more details.
Teenager Anastasia clutched her grey cat as she watched her grandfather in a wheelchair being loaded onto a minibus waiting to rush them to a nearby village.
'Hope the war will spare us'
"We could never have expected this. We're going to the village, we hope the war will spare us there," she said.
Ukrainian military personnel and trucks swarmed around the town as the government in Kyiv insisted its forces would do all they could to protect Ukraine.
Across Ukraine's vulnerable eastern front civilians and soldiers scrambled to react as one of the world's most powerful militaries began what authorities warned was a "full-scale invasion".
Some 300 kilometres to the south in key port city of Mariupol — close to the frontline where Russia-backed separatists have been fighting Ukraine — authorities were rushing to evacuate civilians as fighting raged.
Local official Alexiy Babchenko said they were starting to move people out of two areas to the nearest railway station — but the violence was too heavy to begin in another location.
"It is under heavy artillery," he told AFP.
Yevgeny Kaplin, head of the humanitarian organisation Proliska, said attacks were going on across the entire frontline that had divided Ukrainian forces from an enclave held by Russian-backed rebels.
But poor communications were hampering information coming about victims.
"The offensive is underway along the entire demarcation line in the Lugansk and Donetsk regions," he said.
"Fighting is happening everywhere. We cannot yet receive information about victims, because there is no communication in this area." — with Yulia Silina in Mariupol
President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday secured Turkey's crucial backing for Ukraine's NATO aspirations after winning a US pledge for cluster munitions that could inflict massive damage on Russian forces on the battlefield.
Washington's decision to deliver the controversial weapons — banned across a large part of the world but not in Russia or Ukraine — dramatically ups the stakes in the war, which entered its 500th day Saturday.
Zelensky has been travelling across Europe trying to secure bigger and better weapons for his outmatched army, which has launched a long-awaited counteroffensive that is progressing less swiftly than Ukraine's allies had hoped. — AFP
Washington's decision to supply Ukraine with ATACMS long-range missiles is "a grave mistake", Russian ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov says Wednesday.
"The White House's decision to send long-range missiles to Ukrainians is a grave mistake. The consequences of this step, which was deliberately hidden from the public, will be of the most serious nature," he says in a statement. — AFP
President Vladimir Putin says Sunday that Russian forces had made gains in their Ukraine offensive including in Avdiivka, a symbolic industrial hub.
"Our troops are improving their position in almost all of this area, which is quite vast," he says in an interview on Russian television, an extract of which was posted on social media on Sunday. "This concerns the areas of Kupiansk, Zaporizhia and Avdiivka." — AFP
The regional governor says debris from a drone destroyed over the Russian region of Belgorod, which borders Ukraine, fell on homes and killed three people, including a young child.
The air defense system "shot down an aircraft-type UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) approaching the city", says Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov, adding that the falling debris destroyed several homes.
"Most importantly, three people were killed, one of them a small child," he writes on the Telegram messaging app, accompanied by pictures of a house reduced to a pile of rubble behind red and white police tape. — AFP
Ukraine's air force says on Tuesday that it had destroyed 27 of 36 Russian attack drones overnight in the south of the country.
Ukrainian forces downed 27 "Shahed-136/131" drones in the southern Kherson, Mykolaiv and Odesa regions, the air force said on the messaging platform Telegram.
In all, Moscow had launched 36 of the Iranian-made drones from the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014, it says. — AFP
The Kremlin claims on Friday Russian forces never targeted civilian infrastructure after Ukraine blamed Moscow for a missile attack that killed over 50 people in the eastern village of Groza.
"We repeat that the Russian military does not strike civilian targets. Strikes are carried out on military targets, on places where military personnel are concentrated," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says in his daily briefing. — AFP
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