The Latest Developments in the War in Ukraine
Megan Specia, Andrew E. Kramer and Victoria Kim
Here are the latest developments in the war in Ukraine.
Russian forces are slowly gaining ground in eastern Ukraine, seizing the city of Lyman and coming closer to surrounding the much larger city of Sievierodonetsk, as the wide-scale devastation wreaked by their offensive on towns and cities in the region widens a spiraling crisis for civilians.
Moscow’s strikes continued to exact a daily toll on Friday, and not just in the eastern Donbas region where the fighting is concentrated. In Dnipro, in east-central Ukraine, an official said that at least 10 people had been killed and at least 30 injured in the early morning, when a missile launched from Russia’s Rostov region hit a Ukrainian National Guard facility.
Russian and Ukrainian officials confirmed on Friday that Russian forces had captured Lyman, the second small Ukrainian city to fall to them this week. Moscow’s forces have encircled two-thirds of Sievierodonetsk, the easternmost city still under Ukrainian control, the province’s leader said.
Lyman’s fall followed intense bombardment, reportedly including strikes with one of the most fearsome weapons in Russia’s conventional arsenal: thermobaric, or fuel-air explosives that set off huge, destructive shock waves. Their use highlights Russia’s strategy of making incremental advances by reducing cities and towns to rubble before attempting to move in on the ground.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine warned in an overnight address that Russian forces were trying to turn cities and towns in the east of the country “to ashes.” With civilians also being killed at an alarming rate, he charged that the actions amounted to “an obvious policy of genocide pursued by Russia.”
A new report from international legal scholars released on Friday echoed such claims about the war generally. It said that mass killings, deliberate attacks on shelters or evacuation routes, and the indiscriminate bombardment of residential areas by Russian forces established a “genocidal pattern” indicating an intent to wipe out a substantial part of the Ukrainian population.
In other developments:
* European Union leaders will gather in Brussels on Monday and Tuesday to discuss the war in Ukraine, focusing on the country’s financial needs for reconstruction and the effect the war is having on energy and global food prices, the European Council’s president said.
* Several neighborhoods in Kharkiv, the northeastern city where the Ukrainians repelled an attempted Russian encirclement in mid-May, came under fire on Thursday, with at least nine people killed. It shattered a sense of relative peace that had begun returning to the country’s second-largest city.
* The Biden administration said it expected Russia to default on its bond payments to U.S. investors now that the Treasury Department has allowed to lapse a sanctions exemption that permitted Russia to make those payments.
From The New York Times
Information 감사합니다
http://www.loaloachristiannetwork.com/
<Photo from app>