Putin’s forces fired over 800 glide bombs as infant injured in Russian strikes

Russian forces attacked Ukraine’s two largest cities on Sunday, with missile fragments falling on a suburban Kyiv apartment building and a guided bomb killing one person in Kharkiv.

In Kyiv’s Obolon suburb, the local military administration said falling fragments from a Russian missile started a fire and damaged balconies on a 14-storey apartment building yesterday.

Emergency services, writing on Telegram, said five women were treated for stress, and mayor Vitali Klitschko said 10 residents had been evacuated.

Emergency services posted a picture online showing at least four blackened balconies.

The head of the military administration of Kyiv region said missile fragments had also fallen outside the capital, causing injuries and damage, though no details were provided.

Russian forces were prevented from advancing on Kyiv in the early weeks of the February 2022 invasion and were redeployed along the 1,000km (600-mile) front line in the east.

Attacks on Kyiv are less frequent than other cities, although the capital endured a series of assaults in March. Kharkiv has come under regular attack, but military analysts say the frequency has dipped since the United States authorised Ukrainian use of its weapons on certain Russian targets.

In Kharkiv, which never fell into Russian hands in the early stages of the war, a guided bomb started a fire and killed a delivery service driver outside a depot yesterday.

Regional governor Oleh Synehubov said nine people were injured, including an 8-month-old infant. Pictures posted online showed the depot and trucks outside it badly damaged.

More than 28 months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russian forces maintain regular attacks on Ukrainian cities as well as on energy infrastructure.

Russian forces have used more than 800 glide bombs in the past week to hit Ukraine, president Volodymyr Zelensky said last night. The Ukrainian war-time president shared photos of the Russian strikes on the besieged country’s cities – Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro, Odesa, Sumy, Kherson, Donetsk and Kharkiv.

“This week alone, Russia has used more than 800 guided aerial bombs against Ukraine. Against our cities and communities, against our people, against everything that makes life normal,” he said on X.

Calling for increased aerial support to intercept these bombs, Mr Zelensky said: “Ukraine needs the necessary means to destroy the carriers of these bombs, including Russian combat aircraft, wherever they are. This step is essential. Clear decisions are needed to help protect our people. Long-range strikes and modern air defense are the foundation for stopping the daily Russian terror.”

Russia-appointed officials in Donetsk, which is partially occupied and illegally annexed by Moscow, said that Ukrainian shelling on Sunday wounded a 4-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl. According to Russia’s Emergencies Ministry, four of its staff also came under shelling Sunday as they attempted to put out a fire in the Kremlin-occupied local capital, also called Donetsk. The Russian Defense Ministry on Sunday reported its forces overnight shot down three dozen Ukrainian drones over six regions in Russia’s southwest. It later said that a total of 72 were downed on Saturday and during the night. Debris from one drone fell on a village in the Kursk region, blowing out windows and damaging roofs and fences, according to a Telegram post by regional Gov. Aleksey Smirnov.

Ukraine attacked Russia’s Bryansk and Kursk regions with at least 25 drones, according to governors of the regions in Russia’s southwest, who said all of the air weapons were destroyed.

Russia’s air defence systems downed 18 drones over the Bryansk region that borders Ukraine, Alexander Bogomaz, governor of the region said on the Telegram messaging app.

He said the strikes came in several waves and the drones were downed across many districts of the region.

Alexei Smirnov, governor of the Kursk region that also borders Ukraine, said on Telegram seven drones were destroyed over his region.

Both the governors said there were no injuries or extensive damage as a result of the attacks. Russian officials often do not disclose the full extent of damage inflicted by Ukrainian attacks.

Russian forces have taken over the villages of Spirne and Novooleksandrivka in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, the Russian defence ministry said yesterday.

The ministry said its forces have also improved their positions along the frontline around the villages.

The Ukrainian military has not confirmed the Russian capture yet.

Zelensky called on countries assisting Ukraine to further relax restrictions on using Western weapons to strike military targets inside Russia.

“Clear decisions are needed to help protect our people,” he said. “Long-range strikes and modern air defense are the foundation for stopping the daily Russian terror. I thank all our partners who understand this.”

Hours after Zelenskyy spoke, Ukrainian officials said Russian glide bombs had struck near a postal warehouse in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city in the northeast, killing an employee and injuring nine people including an 8-month-old baby.

According to a statement by Nova Poshta, the private postal and courier company that operates the site, the strike set at least seven delivery trucks ablaze, while damaging at least three others and the warehouse itself. One driver died as a result.

Russian missiles slammed into a town in southern Ukraine, killing seven civilians, including children, and wounding dozens, local authorities reported.

Ukrainian officials published photos of bodies stretched out under picnic blankets in a park in Vilniansk, and deep craters in the blackened earth next to the charred, twisted remains of a building.

At least 38 people were wounded in Saturday evening’s attack, authorities said, and declared a day of mourning Sunday. Vilniansk is in the Zaporizhzhia region, less than 30 kilometers (20 miles) from the local capital and north of the front lines, as Russian forces continue to occupy part of the province.

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Long-serving Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte urged his country to support Ukraine and international cooperation in his final address to his compatriots Sunday, as an inward-looking new government is set to take over the Netherlands in two days.

“It is crucial that our country is embedded in the European Union and NATO. Together we are stronger than alone. Especially now,” the 57-year-old Rutte said from his office in The Hague.

After leading the country for 14 years, he will take his experience with consensus-building to Brussels, where he will take over as NATO’s new secretary-general later this year.

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Drone footage from Ukraine’s military released Sunday has shown what appears to be bodies in a civilian area in the embattled eastern town of Toretsk, which has come under heavy Russian bombardment in recent days.

The attacks in the war-torn Donetsk region have prompted a scaled-up evacuation effort by Ukrainian rescue services. Local officials said that powerful Russian glide bombs have also been used in the town, the latest eastern front flash point as Russian attacks continue to put stretched Ukrainian front-line units on the defensive.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday that Russia had dropped more than 800 glide bombs in Ukraine in the past week alone.

“Ukraine needs the necessary means to destroy the carriers of these bombs, including Russian combat aircraft, wherever they are. This step is essential,” he wrote in an online post.

Russia is planning to send children to a summer camp in North Korea in late July, according to state news agency TASS.

This follows the signing of a strategic deal by Russia and North Korea on 19 June.

Groups of children accompanied by counsellors will attend the camps in North Korea’s Sondovon.

“We are now planning joint camp shifts… We are planning children’s exchanges,” Grigory Gurov, head of the Russian youth group Movement of the First, said, according to The Kyiv Independent.