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WASHINGTON — The United States plans a sharp increase in the number of Ukrainian troops it instructs at a base in Germany, with a new focus on advanced battlefield tactics, the Pentagon announced on Thursday.
The expanded training would emphasize “combined arms” warfare — tight coordination among infantry, artillery, armored vehicles and, when it is available, air support, so that each group is strengthened and protected by the others.
The training is expected to begin in January and would enable American instructors to train a Ukrainian battalion, or about 500 troops, each month, and the numbers could grow, Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, said at a news briefing. Other U.S. officials said the battalions could range up to 800 soldiers each.
American forces are training about 300 Ukrainians per month — 3,100 since the war began — with a focus on teaching them to use specific advanced U.S. weapons systems. That includes 610 soldiers who have learned to use the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, that Ukraine has used to devastating effect against Russian forces, hitting targets far behind the front lines, including ammunition depots, command posts and bridges.
Allied nations have instructed 12,000 Ukrainian troops, the Pentagon said, primarily new recruits who have gone to Britain for basic infantry training.
Combined arms tactics are skills that are not familiar to many Ukrainian troops, though Ukraine used them to a degree in successful counteroffensives in the last few months in the northeast and south.
Colin H. Kahl, the under secretary of defense for policy, said in a statement: “Training is important to Ukraine’s continued success on the battlefield by ensuring that Ukraine has the skilled forces necessary to sustain its efforts to push back on Russian aggression.”
The new training is set to take place at a U.S. Army base in Grafenwoehr, Germany, where the Pentagon conducts its own combined arms training. The base is also home to the Joint Multinational Training Group-Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials have been wary of pulling too many troops off the front lines at any given time for specialized weapons training. But with winter slowing the tempo of fighting in many parts of the combat zone, officials said the coming months would provide a window.
From 2015 to early this year, American military instructors trained more than 27,000 Ukrainian soldiers at the Yavoriv Combat Training Center in western Ukraine, near the city of Lviv, Pentagon officials said. The United States withdrew 150 military instructors before the war began.
Months after the war began, the United States and other Western countries began training Ukrainian forces in Germany and Poland.
In addition, Britain started a program to provide military training in Britain to 10,000 Ukrainian Army recruits and staff members, an effort that aims to help bolster local resistance to the Russian invasion. The initiative, announced in June by Boris Johnson, the prime minister at the time, began with more than 1,000 British soldiers from the 11th Security Force Assistance Brigade, which specializes in foreign training.
Other nations, including Canada, Denmark, Finland, Lithuania, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway and Sweden, joined in after Britain requested help.
Adm. Sir Tony Radakin, Britain’s chief of defense, said on Wednesday that the initial goal of training 10,000 Ukrainian recruits had nearly been met.
“This is significant,” he said in a speech in London.
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KYIV, Ukraine — An expanded training program the Pentagon intends to provide the Ukrainian military would bolster military skills already practiced in two successful counteroffensives, in northeastern and southern Ukraine, but that are not widely held in an army that has mostly adopted defensive positions.
President Biden approved the broader training effort this week, according to two U.S. officials.
Before Ukraine counterattacked Russian lines in the Kharkiv region in northeastern Ukraine and Kherson region in the south, military analysts had mentioned the Ukrainian military’s inexperience in so-called combined arms combat, where armored vehicles, infantry and artillery work in concert. Both counteroffensives were nonetheless successful.
The offensive in the south began in August with just such a maneuver, using U.S.-provided M113 armored personnel carriers to push deeper into western Kherson Oblast, according to commanders in the south.
But most of Ukraine’s military has fought defensively, often in trenches, including against a Russian military incursion in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and after Russia expanded the war with a multipronged invasion of Ukraine in February.
The new U.S. program focuses on advanced skills, and would fill a gap between a British training course that instructs new recruits on basic military skills and the specialized training on specific weapons systems.
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The U.S. State Department announced a new round of sanctions on prominent Russians, including an industrial metal tycoon who is one of the country’s wealthiest men.
The sanctions block financial transactions in dollars with the tycoon, Vladimir Potanin. He is the largest shareholder of Russia’s Nornickel, the world’s largest producer of palladium and refined nickel. He is also a former deputy prime minister and “a close associate of” President Vladimir V. Putin, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said in a statement.
The sanctions included Mr. Potanin’s wife and two adult children. Also targeted was Mr. Potanin’s company, Interros, which the State Department said has “business across nearly all sectors of Russia’s economy.”
The United States also designated Mr. Potanin’s superyacht, Nirvana, as blocked property subject to seizure.
The State Department action also hit five board members of Russia’s state-owned rail company, and included 29 Russian heads of regions and governors.
“These governors oversee and enforce the conscription of citizens in response to Russia’s recent mobilization order,” Mr. Blinken said in his statement.
The sanctions include Oleksii Dykiy, who leads a Russian reconnaissance battalion that participated in the military destruction of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, and who “oversees the operations of filtration camps that facilitate the forced relocation of Ukraine’s citizens to Russia,” Mr. Blinken said.
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KYIV, Ukraine — President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has said he is working with the United Nations to try to dispatch international observers to civilian infrastructure sites in Ukraine, which have been targeted in a relentless campaign by the Russian military to destroy key utility systems.
“Today, I held very important negotiations” with António Guterres, the secretary general, Mr. Zelensky said in his nightly address late on Wednesday. “We are currently working on organizing missions with an international mandate to the objects of the critical energy infrastructure of our state. I believe that this can also be successful.”
An international mission, Mr. Zelensky said in a tweet, could include “experts,” but he did not spell out what role they would perform.
The United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Kyiv has for years striven to involve the United Nations in a peacekeeping role in Ukraine to safeguard against Russian military actions, without success. Russia, as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, could veto any proposal it opposed. A long-running negotiation to bring peacekeepers to eastern Ukraine before the full-scale invasion unraveled without any deployment.
The United Nations helped broker a Ukrainian agreement with Turkey to safeguard grain cargo ships sailing from the port of Odesa, providing protection from Russian naval attacks on the ships. The organization helped coordinate Ukrainian grain shipments during the war to countries at risk of famine in Africa, an initiative called “Grain From Ukraine.” In his address, Mr. Zelensky thanked Mr. Guterres for “his constant support of Ukraine and international law, for effective assistance in the implementation of our initiatives,” including the “Grain From Ukraine” program.
U.N. aid and human rights agencies are active in Ukraine assisting internally displaced people and investigating war crimes. But any agreement to send U.N. personnel to Ukrainian power plants, waterworks and gas pumping stations would presumably require Russian consent. The sites are near daily targets of cruise missiles and exploding drones.
Ukraine’s state electrical company has said Russia has targeted missiles, drones or artillery at elements of the country’s electrical grid more than 1,000 times since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in February. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said last week that Russian forces were striking the infrastructure sites in retaliation for an explosion in October that damaged a bridge tying occupied Crimea to Russia.
Safeguarding infrastructure has strained Ukraine’s air defenses, even as it shoots down a majority of the missiles and drones fired by Russia. The air defenses are also needed to protect troops along the front line.
Allies have tried to help by sending new equipment. But as more power plants, electrical substations and pylons for transmission lines are blown up, Ukraine has been searching for other strategies. Officials have asserted their right to strike back at airfields inside Russia where bombers take off to launch cruise missiles at Ukraine.
The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, agreed this week to maintain a continuous presence at all of Ukraine’s nuclear power stations, including the defunct Chernobyl plant, the agency and Ukraine’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, said on Tuesday. Their presence might deter attacks on nuclear plants or nearby electrical infrastructure. Ukraine also operates hydroelectric, natural gas, solar and coal power plants.
One goal of Russia’s assault on the electrical grid is to drive refugees into Europe, putting pressure on Western governments, military analysts have said. In a survey by the International Organization for Migration published this week, 7 percent of Ukrainians said they were considering moving because of electrical blackouts or lack of water or heat. Two thirds said they would not move even if the power cuts and utility disruptions were prolonged.
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WASHINGTON — Over the past eight months, Paul Whelan has watched helplessly as two other Americans detained in Russia, both imprisoned after him, were released in prisoner exchanges while he was left stranded behind the barbed wire of IK-17, a penal colony nearly eight hours from Moscow.
Russia insists that Mr. Whelan, 52, is a spy who was caught red-handed, one whose 16-year sentence for espionage is richly deserved. In the Kremlin’s harsh game of human bartering, that makes the asking price for his release higher than it was for the basketball star Brittney Griner, who was convicted on drug smuggling charges but freed last week, and for Trevor Reed, who was sentenced for assaulting two Moscow police officers but released in April.
As a result, supporters of Mr. Whelan and analysts say, there is no clear path for his release.
“Unfortunately, Russia has continued to see Paul’s case through the lens of sham espionage charges,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken recently said, “and they are treating him differently than they treated Brittney Griner.”
On Monday, Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, said U.S. officials would have “an engagement” with Russia about Mr. Whelan’s case this week.
Mr. Whelan’s sister, Elizabeth Whelan, said in an interview that a new approach was necessary. “I’ve had some wild and crazy ideas that I’ve been sharing with the government,” she said. Ms. Whelan spoke to Mr. Biden last week and to White House officials on Monday.
Ms. Whelan conceded that confusion persisted about whether her brother might be guilty of the espionage that Russian prosecutors say he was committing when he visited Russia in December 2018. While at Moscow’s upscale Metropol hotel, Mr. Whelan greeted a Russian acquaintance who handed him a USB stick. Minutes later, he was arrested by Russian agents, who said the device contained a classified list of Russian Federal Security Service agents.
“You have a lot of people out there talking very ignorantly, thinking he’s James Bond or something,” Ms. Whelan said.
American intelligence agencies have a strict policy of never confirming, or denying, that any individual worked for the U.S. government as a spy or informant. But Biden administration officials insist that the charges against him are fabricated and have classified him, as they did Ms. Griner, as “wrongfully detained,” tantamount to a political prisoner.
And in private, American officials flatly state that Mr. Whelan was not an intelligence informant. He is, they said, what he appears to be: a slightly eccentric Russophile who was entrapped by an ambitious intelligence agent he had befriended years before, apparently not realizing the man’s full background.
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BOROVSK, Russia — An 84-year-old artist was standing in front of one of the many murals he has painted in his provincial hometown one recent day when a group of young women passed by. They had traveled some 60 miles from Moscow just to see his latest work, and they tittered at the encounter.
“This is so cool,” said one. “You are the main attraction of town.”
The artist, Vladimir A. Ovchinnikov, has long covered the walls of the town with pastoral scenes, portraits of poets and daily life, in the process earning himself a reputation as the “Banksy of Borovsk.”
But it is his political art that is now attracting attention. At a time when dissent is being crushed across Russia, Mr. Ovchinnikov has been painting murals protesting the invasion of Ukraine.
The comparison to Banksy is one he does not appreciate. Unlike the mysterious British-based street artist, Mr. Ovchinnikov works for all to see. And where a politically charged new Banksy offering may be cause for sensation, Mr. Ovchinnikov’s murals are not always welcomed — at least, not by the authorities.
“I draw doves, they paint over them,” he said.
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The Kremlin said Wednesday that it would consider American air defense systems in Ukraine legitimate military targets, potentially raising the stakes for the Biden administration, which U.S. officials say is poised to approve sending its most advanced air defense system.
Russia would “undoubtedly” target the Patriot air defense system if the Pentagon carries out its plans of supplying Kyiv with a battery, the Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told reporters on Wednesday.
The Pentagon may approve a transfer to Ukraine as early as this week to help the country defend against Russian bombardment of its critical infrastructure, the U.S. officials said on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Final approval would then rest with President Biden.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Thursday warned that Washington’s plans to supply Ukraine with the defense system raised the risk of drawing the U.S. military directly into the war.
“Many experts have doubted the wisdom of such a step, which leads to the escalation of the conflict,” the ministry’s spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, told reporters.
It is unclear whether any American military personnel or contractors would be involved in operating the Patriot system from inside Ukraine, and Russia has already said it would target other Western military aid in Ukraine, including the highly effective American-made HIMARS multiple-rocket launchers.
The Patriot system would be one of the most advanced weapons in the Ukrainian arsenal, and a sign of the United States’ deepening military commitment to Ukraine as Russia paints its war in Ukraine as a conflict with the West. The system can knock down Russia’s ballistic missiles, unlike others the West has provided, and can hit targets much farther away.
Many questions remain about the potential transfer, which was reported earlier by CNN, including how long it would take to train Ukrainian soldiers on the system, presumably in Germany, and where the Patriots would be deployed inside Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials have intensified their pleas for air defenses from the United States and other Western allies as Russia has conducted relentless attacks on power plants, heating systems and other energy infrastructure. The attacks, using missiles and Iranian-made drones, have left Ukrainians vulnerable and in the dark just as the coldest time of the year is beginning.
The Pentagon’s active-duty Patriot units frequently deploy for missions around the world, and experts say there are not deep stockpiles of Patriot missiles available for transfer to Ukraine in the same way that the United States provided a large quantity of artillery shells and rockets to Kyiv for use in combat.
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Ukraine’s Parliament passed legislation this week that would significantly expand the government’s regulatory power over the news media, a measure that supporters say will help the country meet European Union criteria for membership but which Ukrainian journalists and international press freedom groups warn will threaten freedom of speech and of the press.
President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose administration has been criticized for undermining press freedoms, must sign the bill for it to become law. He ordered the drafting of a law increasing media regulation in 2019 but has yet to signal whether he will sign the bill as it was approved by the Parliament.
If the measure becomes law, Ukraine’s state broadcasting regulator, the National Council of Television and Radio Broadcasting, will expand its authority to cover the online and print news media. The regulator will be given the power to fine media outlets, revoke their licenses, temporarily block certain online media outlets without a court order, and request that social media platforms and search giants like Google remove content that violates the law, the Ukrainian news media has reported.
The measure was passed by Parliament on Tuesday along with a spate of other bills that lawmakers say were intended to help the country meet the European Union’s legislative conditions for membership. The bills included measures to protect the rights of national minorities.
“We have opened the way to the start of negotiations on Ukraine’s full accession to the European Union, which can begin as early as the new year of 2023,” said Olena Kondratyuk, the Parliament’s deputy speaker.
But Ukrainian journalists said the new media statute went far beyond what the European Union requires. They have accused the government of using the membership obligations as a pretext to seize greater control of the press.
Earlier versions of the media bill drew domestic and international criticism as they moved through Parliament. In July, the general secretary of the European Federation of Journalists, Ricardo Gutiérrez, called the bill’s regulation “coercive” and “worthy of the worst authoritarian regimes.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists, a nonprofit group that champions press freedom around the world, called for Ukrainian lawmakers to drop the bill in September, saying that it tightened “government control over information at a time when citizens need it the most.”
Changes to the draft law were made in closed-door parliamentary committee meetings, and a list of amendments to the 959-page text was posted publicly just one day before Tuesday’s vote, the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine said.
The union warned in a statement before the latest parliamentary vote that the bill would help erode the freedoms that “distinguish the social system of Ukraine from the regime of dictatorial Russia.” On Wednesday, the union said that it hoped Mr. Zelensky would return the bill to the Parliament for reconsideration.
The deputy chair of the Parliament’s information policy committee, Yevheniia Kravchuk, countered the charge that supporters had used E.U. requirements as cover for an attempt to rein in press freedoms, arguing that sweeping changes to Ukraine’s media legislation were overdue.
“Of course, this bill is even broader than the E.U. directive, because we needed to change and modernize our media legislation, which has not been changed for 16 years,” she said in a statement after the bill was adopted. “It was adopted back when there was no internet at all.”
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The Olympic Games in Paris are still two years away, but already there is a question of whether Russian and Belarusian athletes will be allowed to compete under their nations’ flags.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine weighed in on Wednesday, urging the International Olympic Committee to prohibit those athletes’ participation regardless of what flag they carry, days after the committee’s top official expressed a new tone of openness about easing restrictions.
In a phone call with the committee’s president, Thomas Bach, Mr. Zelensky said that allowing the athletes to compete under a neutral flag would not be enough to punish Russia.
“Since February, 184 Ukrainian athletes have died as a result of Russia’s actions,” Mr. Zelensky said on the call, according to a readout from the Ukrainian president’s office. “One cannot try to be neutral when the foundations of peaceful life are being destroyed and universal human values are being ignored.”
In February, the I.O.C. recommended that Russian and Belarusian athletes be barred from competitions, breaking from the organization’s typical stance that athletes should not be punished for their government’s actions.
In a statement, the organization cited “the integrity of global sports competitions” and “the safety of all the participants” as two factors in the decision, which was issued “with a heavy heart.” There are some situations in which the athletes could be allowed to compete as neutral athletes, the statement said.
But in recent days I.O.C. officials have been unclear about whether Russian and Belarusian athletes will be allowed to compete in the 2024 Summer Olympics. Although the organization has not changed its formal guidance from February, there are signs that it is looking to ease its restrictions.
“We need to explore ways to overcome this dilemma with regard to athletes’ participation and come back to sporting merits and not political interference,” Mr. Bach said in a news conference last week, according to Reuters.
Mr. Bach emphasized that the I.O.C.’s original guidance was for athletes’ safety. “What we never did and did not want to do was prohibit athletes from competing in competitions only due to their passports,” he said, adding that the I.O.C. had not yet set a date by which to make a decision.
In the past, athletes from countries under Olympic sanctions had been allowed to compete under an Olympic flag rather than their national flag. Russian athletes did so in the Beijing Olympics in February after Russia was found to have been involved in a major doping scandal in the 2014 Olympics. And in 1980, when many nations boycotted the Olympic Games in Moscow over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, some athletes from the boycotting countries competed under neutral flags.
A top U.S. Olympic official this week endorsed considering “a pathway back” for Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete under a neutral flag. A group of high-ranking Olympic officials from around the world convened in Lausanne, Switzerland, last week to discuss the issue.
“We agreed that there would now be an exploration and a consultation with stakeholders to see whether there could be a pathway for those individual athletes to come back as neutral,” said Susanne Lyons, the chair of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, according to Reuters.
A correction was made on
Dec. 15, 2022
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An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the location of the 2018 Winter Olympics. They were in Pyeongchang, South Korea, not Moscow.
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President Volodymyr Zelensky called on European leaders to immediately set up a special tribunal to hold Russia accountable for its war in Ukraine, describing it as a “historical responsibility” as he accepted the European Union’s top human rights award on behalf of the Ukrainian people on Wednesday.
“It is necessary to act now — without waiting for the end of the war,” Mr. Zelensky said, citing what he called Russia’s “crime of aggression.” He spoke via video link at a ceremony for the award, the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, held in Strasbourg, France.
The prize, given by members of the European Parliament, was awarded to the people of Ukraine for what the president of the legislature said was a recognition that ordinary citizens were risking their lives to defend not only their own independence, but also freedom and democracy across Europe.
Mr. Zelensky was cited as the face of the Ukrainian people’s courage and for his “devotion to his people and to European values.” In his address, Mr. Zelensky said a special tribunal to prosecute “the crime of Russian aggression” was necessary to protect freedom, human rights and the rule of law. He urged European officials to “turn it into reality as soon as possible.”
“This will be the most effective protection of freedom, human rights, the rule of law and other common values of ours, which are embodied, in particular, by this award of the European Parliament,” he said.
Mr. Zelensky and Ukrainian officials have for months championed the creation of a tribunal, which they say could work alongside the International Criminal Court but bypass its long, onerous prosecution process.
Roberta Metsola, the president of the European Parliament, who supports the creation of a tribunal, said at the ceremony that Ukrainians were fighting “with nothing but pride as their weapons” for “the values that underpin our life in the European Union.”
In addition to honoring the Ukrainian people, the Sakharov Prize recognized the bravery of Ukrainian activists, the state’s emergency services and prominent public figures like Ivan Fedorov, the exiled mayor of the Russian-occupied city of Melitopol. The prize’s accompanying monetary award of 50,000 euros, about $53,000, will be distributed among members of Ukrainian civil society.
The prize, established in 1988, is named after Andrei D. Sakharov, the nuclear physicist and Nobel laureate who helped develop the hydrogen bomb for the Soviet Union and subsequently became a champion of human rights.
This fall, as Russia’s losses mounted in Ukraine, President Vladimir V. Putin announced a draft. Almost immediately, hundreds of thousands of men fled the country, though many more stayed. In a new episode of “The Daily” podcast, Valerie Hopkins, an international correspondent for The New York Times, spoke to Russians at a draft office in Moscow about how they felt about going to war.
Listen to ‘The Daily’: Scenes From a Russian Draft Office
What do citizens caught up in the mass mobilization think about the war in Ukraine — and what does that mean for President Vladimir V. Putin?
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A land mine killed an 8-year-old boy this week in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, the authorities said on Thursday, in a case that has stoked outrage and pointed to a growing problem facing the country in areas recently recaptured from Russia.
“The doctors tried to resuscitate him for an hour,” a spokesman for the Ukrainian military in the province, Dmytro Pletenchuk, said in a Facebook post on Thursday. “He had too many traumas.” Mr. Pletenchuk gave no further details of the boy’s death and there was no independent confirmation, but comments on his post in Ukrainian expressed anger at Russian forces.
Anti-personnel mines are one of the more insidious cruelties that Ukrainians have faced since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, and they are emerging as a long-term impediment to restoring normal life in recaptured areas.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said this week that the country needed help clearing mines and unexploded ordnance from more than 67,000 square miles of its territory. Almost daily, a report of someone killed or wounded in a mine explosion features in an update from a provincial official.
The problem is most acute in places where Russian forces recently have retreated. These include land north of the capital, Kyiv, after Russia’s withdrawal in the early months of the conflict, as well as territory in the northeastern province of Kharkiv that Moscow occupied for months before being driven back in September. More recently Russia has pulled back from parts of Kherson Province west of the Dnipro River, where the boy died.
“This is the form of Russian terror that will have to be countered for years to come,” Mr. Zelensky said in a speech this week. “Terrorists deliberately try to leave behind as many death traps as possible.” He argued that because mines are small and often buried there can be no defense against them.
Ukraine is a signatory to the 1997 mine ban treaty. While Russia has not signed, it is still bound by prohibitions on mine use, in part under the Geneva Conventions. (The United States also hasn’t signed the treaty.)
Both Ukraine and Russia have deployed anti-vehicle mines in the war, notably in the Donbas region in the east of the country, but Human Rights Watch said in a report in June that there is no credible information that Ukraine had used anti-personnel mines.
Ukraine, supported by the United States and other allies, as well as by humanitarian groups, has embarked on a program to clear mines and other ordnance. The scale of the task is immense. Between Dec. 7 and Dec. 13, more than 1,000 “explosive objects” were detonated or removed in Kharkiv Province, a local official said on Telegram. It was not possible to verify the figures independently.
In September, one member of a mine clearing crew died and another was wounded while removing explosives from a railway track in Kharkiv Province, according to the head of Ukraine’s national rail system, Olexander Kamyshin. Three police officers in Kherson Province this week received posthumous state awards after they were killed by mines.
Other emergency workers are also at risk. On Oct. 2, an ambulance responding to an emergency call in Balakliya, a city in Kharkiv, drove over a mine, killing the driver, according to a statement by the health ministry.
Mines pose a particular problem in fields, woods and other rural areas, given that they are often laid to force advancing forces onto roads. Jan Egeland, the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, said that on a recent trip to Kharkiv Province he had spent time in a village where residents, struggling to stay warm given Russian attacks on the country’s energy infrastructure, were unable to go out to the collect firewood because the countryside was “peppered” with mines.
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Russian forces repeatedly shelled the recently reclaimed Kherson region in southern Ukraine on Thursday, as Ukrainian troops bombarded the Russian-held Donetsk region in the east, according to officials in those areas.
Since Ukrainian forces retook Kherson last month, Russian forces have carried out sustained attacks on its energy grid, knocking out power to the beaten-down region.
Thursday’s strikes again targeted critical infrastructure facilities, and also hit in the city’s center. At least two civilians in the region were killed and nine were injured, Yaroslav Yanushevich, the head of the Kherson regional military administration, said in a statement posted on Telegram.
“Fragments of enemy shells” caused the deaths, Mr. Yanushevich said. He identified one victim as a woman volunteering with an international aid organization.
“During the shelliing, she was just helping people,” he said.
In President Volodymyr Zelensky’s nightly address to Ukraine, he said that Russia had shelled Kherson 16 times on Thursday.
East of the Dnipro River, Ukrainian troops launched heavy strikes on the Donetsk People’s Republic, a breakaway area controlled by Russia-backed separatists. One civilian was killed and 11 were injured on Thursday, according to Denis Pushilin, the leader of the self-declared republic. He said the bombardment was the “fiercest” the region has experienced since 2014, when the separatists claimed the territory.
Mr. Pushilin said that rockets had struck civilian targets and that a 10-year-old boy was among the injured, according to the Russian state news agency Tass. The claims could not be independently verified.
