MYKOLAIV, Ukraine: Under pressure in the south of Ukraine, Russia fired missiles and drones into Ukrainian-held Mykolaiv on Sunday, destroying an apartment block in the ship-building city near the front and said the war was trending toward “uncontrolled escalation.”
Mykolaiv lies roughly 35 km (22 miles) northwest of the front line to occupied Kherson, the southern region where Russia has ordered 60,000 people “to save your lives” and flee a Ukrainian counter offensive.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who some Russian nationalists have blamed for Moscow’s setbacks since the Feb. 24 invasion, discussed the “rapidly deteriorating situation” in calls with French and Turkish counterparts, the ministry said.
Without providing evidence, Shoigu said Ukraine could escalate with a “dirty bomb” — conventional explosives laced with radioactive material. Ukraine does not possess nuclear weapons, while Russia has said it could protect Russian territory with its nuclear arsenal.
A Russian missile strike on Sunday wiped out the top floor of an apartment block in Mykolaiv, sending shrapnel and debris across a plaza and into neighboring buildings, smashing windows and cracking walls. Cars were crushed under rubble, Reuters witnessed. No fatalities were recorded.
“After the first blast, I tried to get out, but the door was stuck. After a minute or two, there was a second loud blast. Our door was blown into the corridor,” said Oleksandr Mezinov, 50, who was awoken from his bed by the blasts.
Ukraine shot down 14 Russian “kamikaze” drones over Mykolaiv overnight, regional governor Vitaliy Kim said on Telegram. The drones are designed to explode on impact and have hammered Ukraine’s energy infrastructure this month.
Kim said Russia also attacked with S-300 missiles, one of which hit the five-story apartment building.
Intensifying attacks
Russian troops have withdrawn from parts of the front in recent weeks and occupation authorities are evacuating civilians deeper into Russian-held territory before an expected battle for Kherson, the regional capital on the west bank of the Dnipro river. Kherson is a gateway to Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.
“The situation today is difficult. It’s vital to save your lives,” Russian Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov said in a video message. “It won’t be for long. You will definitely return,” he added.
One man was killed and three injured after a blast in the city, a Russian state news agency said. Emergency services said an improvised explosive device was detonated near a car in the city.
Russia-installed authorities there reported a shortage of vessels to ferry people across the river at one point on Sunday, blaming a “sharp increase in the number of people wishing to leave.”
Around 25,000 people have been evacuated since Tuesday, the Interfax news agency said.
Ukraine’s military said it was making gains in the south, taking over at least two villages it said Russia had abandoned.
Reuters could not independently verify the accounts.
Ukraine’s advances in recent weeks around Kherson and in the country’s northeast have been met with intensifying Russian missile and drone attacks on civilian infrastructure, which have destroyed about 40 percent of Ukraine’s power system ahead of winter.
Winter misery looms
Russia and Ukraine have accused each other of planning to blow up the Nova Kakhovka dam, which holds roughly as much water as the Great Salt Lake in the US state of Utah. Breaching it could flood a swathe of southern Ukraine, including Kherson.
Neither side has produced evidence to back up their claims about the dam, which supplies water to Crimea and the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
In another setback for Moscow, a Russian military jet crashed into a residential building in the Siberian city of Irkutsk in Russia’s far east on Sunday,
killing the two pilots, the second fatal incident in six days involving a Sukhoi fighter plane.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the Russian attacks on energy infrastructure had struck on a “very wide” scale. He pledged his military would improve on an already good record of downing missiles with help from its partners.
With the war about to start its ninth month and winter approaching, the potential for freezing misery loomed.
More than a million people were without power, presidential adviser Kyrylo Tymoshenko said. A city official said strikes could leave Kyiv without power and heat for days or weeks.
Moscow has acknowledged targeting energy infrastructure but denies targeting civilians in what Moscow calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine.
Russia hits Ukraine homes, evacuates Kherson, warns of escalation
https://arab.news/8bkm4
Russia hits Ukraine homes, evacuates Kherson, warns of escalation
- Ukraine’s advances in recent weeks around Kherson and in the country’s northeast have been met with intensifying Russian missile and drone attacks on civilian infrastructure
- Ukrainian PZelensky said the Russian attacks on energy infrastructure had struck on a “very wide” scale
Isolated Kremlin critics lament lost future at Nemtsov memorial
- Hundreds used to flock to the makeshift memorial on the anniversary of his death
- Since Russia ordered troops into Ukraine it has intensified a crackdown on dissent, with almost no opposition to the Kremlin visible on the street
MOSCOW: On a bridge next to the Kremlin on a drizzly Friday morning, a lone Russian police officer stood looking at the half-dozen bunches of flowers laying in memory of slain opposition figure Boris Nemtsov.
The symbolism was almost too much.
Four years into Moscow’s full-scale offensive on Ukraine, which has seen President Vladimir Putin eradicate all forms of dissent and usher in strict military censorship laws that have silenced his critics, few Russians dared, or wanted, to pay tribute.
Nemtsov, a longtime Putin opponent, was shot and killed on February 27 2015, meters from the Kremlin’s red walls. He was 55.
Hundreds used to flock to the makeshift memorial on the anniversary of his death, which came on Friday.
This year, there was barely a trickle. Those who turned up were visibly nervous.
“So few people, they’ve all forgotten,” lamented one elderly man, who refused to give his name.
“Everybody is afraid,” a woman standing nearby added.
Since Russia ordered troops into Ukraine it has intensified a crackdown on dissent, with almost no opposition to the Kremlin visible on the street.
AFP reporters on Friday morning saw only around a dozen mourners alongside Western ambassadors laying red carnations.
“Keep moving, don’t gather in a crowd, don’t block the way for other citizens,” a police officer said through a megaphone.
Three days after Russia launched its offensive on Ukraine in 2022, protesters had staged an impromptu rally against the war at the memorial on the anniversary of Nemtsov’s death.
Nemtsov’s supporters have always accused Chechen leader and key Putin ally Ramzan Kadyrov of ordering his killing.
Kadyrov has rejected the claims.
Five Chechens were convicted of a contract killing but investigators never said who it was ordered by.
- ‘Everything is persecuted’ -
For his followers, Nemtsov is a totemic figure in Russian political life — seen as a once-future leader who might have taken the country on a different path.
“I come here every year,” said 79-year-old scientist Sergei at the bridge on Friday.
“Russia should have had — though unfortunately it didn’t work out — a leader exactly like Nemtsov,” he told AFP, declining to give his surname.
“Right now everything here is suppressed, everything is persecuted, people are sitting in prisons.”
A physicist by education, Nemtsov rose to fame in the 1990s as a young, liberal provincial governor, and was widely tipped to take over from Boris Yeltsin.
He gave his hesitant backing to Putin when the ex-KGB spy was tapped to enter the Kremlin instead, but became an early — and fierce — opponent of what he cast as the Russian leader’s creeping authoritarianism.
He had largely lost popularity and was only a marginal figure in Russian politics when he was killed in 2015. Still, his murder shocked the country and the world.
“The hopes of the whole country were pinned on him — of all the people who wanted it to be free here,” said Olga Vinogradova, a 66-year-old volunteer who tends to the pop-up memorial to Nemtsov on the bridge.
“When this man was killed, naturally, all of us were, we were all just executed at that moment. Because our hopes were destroyed,” she said.
“With this memorial, we remind people that there was a different path for Russia. And that there was a real person who could have led us down this path.”
- ‘Forced out’ -
Nemtsov had strongly opposed Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and Moscow’s military backing for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
He was also a close and early ally of Alexei Navalny, who died in 2024 in an Arctic prison in what his supports say was a poisoning.
Open opposition to the Kremlin is unheard of inside Russia since the first days of the Ukraine offensive — when riot police cracked down hard on the thousands that took to the streets to protest.
All major critics of the Kremlin are in exile, prison or dead.
Those that remain have been silenced.
“Many have been forced out of the country, some have been killed,” said Gleb, a 23-year-old photographer.
A movement or person like Nemtsov was “impossible” to imagine right now, he said.
Still, he held on to a slither of hope.
“But everything can change at any moment.”
