“The enemy has attacked civilian industrial infrastructure in the Danube area,” Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office said in the online service Telegram. The two injured were taken to the hospital.
The Ukrainian Air Force said on Telegram on Sunday that it had fended off several Russian drone strikes in the Odessa region during the night. 22 of the 25 Iranian-made Shahed drones were destroyed.
The Russian military, for its part, reported a “group drone attack” on a Danube port not far from Ukraine’s border with Romania. The aim was a “fuel depot to supply the Ukrainian armed forces in the port of Reni in the Odessa region”. All the intended targets were hit.
Romania condemned the Russian drone strikes near its border. Such attacks against civilian targets are “unjustified and in deep contradiction with the rules of international humanitarian law,” the NATO country’s defense ministry said. At the same time, it assured that “at no time” was there a military threat to Romanian territories or waters.
The Danube ports on the border with Romania have become important transhipment points for Ukrainian grain exports since Russia pulled out of the grain agreement in July. The agreement had enabled Ukraine to transport grain across the Black Sea despite the war. Since its exit, Moscow has increasingly attacked the Ukrainian port infrastructure on the Black Sea and the Danube.
The Ukrainian army had already begun a counteroffensive against the Russian invasion in June, but initially made only slow progress in the east and south. Now it has reported an important success in southern Ukraine: the army has broken through the Russians’ first line of defense in the Zaporizhia region, Ukrainian general Oleksandr Tarnavskij told the British “Guardian”.
The Ukrainian army is now completing “the destruction of the enemy units that are providing cover for Russian troops to retreat behind their second line of defense,” the general said.
On Monday, the Ukrainian army announced that it had recaptured the village of Robotyne. Heavily mined areas have slowed the advance of Ukrainian troops, Tarnavskij said. At night, soldiers cleared a corridor on foot, meter by meter. The Ukrainian army then advanced with tanks and other military vehicles.
According to Tarnawskij, Russia has meanwhile moved more troops to the region. “The enemy is withdrawing reserves, not only from Ukraine but also from Russia,” said the general, under whose command Ukraine had already recaptured the city of Kherson. “But sooner or later the Russians will run out of the best soldiers.”
President Volodymyr Zelenskyj defended the counteroffensive on Saturday against criticism that it was progressing too slowly. The army continues to advance, “and that is the most important thing,” he wrote on Telegram. “We are on the rise.”
According to Russian information on Saturday, Ukraine also shot down three naval drones at the strategically important bridge that leads to the Crimean peninsula annexed by Russia. However, the drones were repelled, it said.
