In Kramatorsk, a city in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk province seen as a possible target for Russian occupation forces, one person was killed in an airstrike that hit a five-story residential building, regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said. The Emergency Service of Ukraine reported on Telegram that 10 people were injured, five of whom were hospitalized, but did not report any deaths. Fresh blood stained the concrete nearby as apartments on at least two floors burned. In the aftermath of the attack, debris was placed in a small pile near an empty playground. “There was no one here. Everything is destroyed,” said Halyna Maydannyk, a resident of a burned-out apartment. “Who knows why they do this? We all lived peacefully.” Kramatorsk residents Mykola Zavodovskyi and Tetiana Zavodovska stood with bandages outside a local hospital. They said they heard a loud clap and went to their balcony to investigate. Then everything exploded and the windows broke. “It was probably a missile and it was probably shot down by Ukrainian forces,” Zavodovska said. The midday strike came after Kirilenko had cited four previous Russian raids in Kramatorsk and urged civilians to leave. Russian forces also fired seven Kalibr cruise missiles overnight at the Odesa region in southern Ukraine. The Russian Defense Ministry said the strikes on the village of Bilenke had a legitimate military objective and “destroyed ammunition depots for weapons supplied by the United States and European countries.” A local official disputed Moscow’s claim and said six people were injured. “These strikes on peaceful people have one goal – to intimidate the population and the authorities and keep them in constant tension,” Serhii Brachuk, the president of the Odesa regional government, told Ukrainian television. Amid indications that Ukraine was planning counterattacks to recapture occupied territories, the Russian military in recent weeks has targeted Odesa and parts of southern Ukraine where its troops seized towns earlier in the war. Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces on the ground in the east are fighting to keep dwindling territory under their control. Donetsk has been cut off from natural gas and partly from water and electricity as the Russians try to complete their takeover of the province. “Cities’ infrastructure is being methodically destroyed by missile strikes, and the civilian population, cut off from the bare necessities, is suffering the most,” Governor Kyrylenko said in televised comments. Officials stationed by Russia in the southern Kherson region, which has been under Moscow’s control since the beginning of the war, said Ukrainian forces destroyed the only bridge in the city of Kherson over the Dnipro River, east of Odessa. Kirill Stremousov, deputy head of the Kremlin-backed Kherson regional command, told Russia’s Interfax news agency that Ukrainian forces used US-made rocket launchers to destroy the bridge in an attempt to cut off Kherson from the left bank of the Dnipro . Ukrainian officials have spoken of plans for a counteroffensive to retake Kherson and other southern Ukrainian territory from the Russians. Serhiy Khlan, an official in the Ukrainian administration of the Kherson region, tacitly confirmed the strike on Ukrainian television, reporting “an accurate hit” and an explosion in the area of the bridge. Ukraine and Russia continued to sporadically exchange bodies of fallen soldiers. Russia’s Ria-Novositi news agency reported that each side gave the other 45 corpses of soldiers in the Zaporizhzhia region. It said the soldiers were killed in Mariupol, the Sea of Azov city that has drawn global attention for a week-long siege of a steel factory. At least two civilians have been killed and 15 others wounded by Russian shelling across Ukraine over the past 24 hours, Ukraine’s presidential office said in a morning briefing. With Russia’s missiles hitting cities 799 kilometers (497 miles) apart on Tuesday, “there remains a high level of threat of missile attacks across the territory of Ukraine,” said Oleksandr Shtupun, a spokesman for the General Staff of the Ukrainian armed forces. The missile strikes came as Britain’s military said it believed Russia was facing “increasingly acute” problems maintaining its troop strength in the brutal war of attrition that began with the February 24 invasion of Ukraine. Britain’s Ministry of Defense said in an assessment on Tuesday morning that Russia has “struggled to maintain an effective offensive combat power since the beginning of the invasion and this problem is becoming increasingly acute” as Moscow tries to seize the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. The British military added: “While Russia may still make further territorial gains, their operational tempo and rate of advance are likely to be very slow without a significant operational pause for reorganization and reconstruction.” In other developments on Tuesday: — Ukraine’s parliament approved President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s decision to fire Ivan Bakanov as head of the country’s Security Service, SBU. Zelensky removed Bakanov, as well as Irina Venediktova, who served as Ukraine’s attorney general, over the weekend. Parliament voted separately to approve Benediktova’s ouster. As part of the reshuffle, Zelensky also fired the heads of five SBU regional branches and a deputy head of the agency on Tuesday. — First Lady of Ukraine Olena Zelenska visited Washington at the invitation of US First Lady Jill Biden. Zelenska met with Foreign Minister Anthony Blinken on Monday. State Department spokesman Ned Price said Blinken assured her of the United States’ commitment to Ukraine and praised her for her work with civilians dealing with trauma and other war damage. Zelenska is expected to meet with Jill Biden on Tuesday.
Cara Anna contributed to this report from Kramatorsk.
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