In the destroyed house in Uman, rescue workers searched for people who had been buried. They were supported by residents, including 33-year-old Dmytro. “I want to find my children, alive or dead,” he told AFP. “They are under the rubble.” The city of Dnipro was also hit by cruise missiles. According to the authorities, a young woman and a three-year-old child were killed here.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the attacks, saying they were bringing Moscow closer to “failure and punishment.” His adviser Mykhailo Podoliak wrote on Twitter: “If you don’t want DAS to spread around the world, give us guns. Lots of guns. And expand the sanctions.”
The Russian Defense Ministry said it had bombed “temporary deployment points of reserve units of the Ukrainian armed forces” with “high-precision weapons”. “All assigned targets have been hit.”
According to the army, eleven cruise missiles and two drones were shot down over the capital. According to the army, 21 of 23 Russian cruise missiles were shot down nationwide. Ukraine’s missile defense was recently massively strengthened by the delivery of state-of-the-art defense systems by the western allies.
According to Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Resnikov, preparations for the expected spring offensive against the Russian attackers are nearing completion. “The equipment was promised, prepared and partly delivered,” he emphasized, referring to Western arms deliveries. “On the whole we are ready.” In recent months, Kiev has repeatedly emphasized its goal of expelling Russian troops from the occupied areas in the south and east of the country.
During the winter, Russian forces had regularly bombed Ukraine’s cities and infrastructure. These attacks have become less frequent in recent weeks, and the capital Kiev has not been fired at with rockets since the beginning of March. However, according to Ukrainian information, it was attacked by Iranian-made Russian drones last week.
The main battlefield in Ukraine is currently the east of the country. From there, the authorities deployed by Moscow in Donetsk reported on Friday that nine people had been killed by Ukrainian shelling. Both a hospital and residential buildings were hit.
The city of Bakhmut, which has been almost completely destroyed and is apparently largely occupied by Russian troops, has been particularly hard fought for weeks. Apparently as a sign of control over the city, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Chusnullin said on Friday that he had visited Bakhmut. “The city is damaged, but you can rebuild it,” he wrote in the online service Telegram.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Zelenskyy said he had asked Chinese leader Xi Jinping to help repatriate kidnapped Ukrainian children from Russia. “We have to involve everyone to put pressure on the Russian aggressor and the terrorists who kidnapped so many of our children,” said Zelenskyy in Kiev. The efforts of the UN and other actors have so far only achieved “poor results”.
According to Kiev, Russia has abducted at least 20,000 children from Ukraine since the war began on February 24, 2022. Only around 360 of them could be brought back to their homeland.
