At least five Ukrainians were killed and 40 more wounded from a thunderous Russian air attacks, as the Moscow-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant was struck Saturday.
Russia batter their war-torn adversary unleashing 290 drones and six missiles overnight, Ukraine’s Air Force reported.
In Sumy, a 59-year-old man was killed and a train station was nearly obliterated from several dozen kamikaze drones in separate attacks — as air raids lasted nearly 24 hours on the frontline region.
“The civilian railway station, from which hundreds of residents of the Sumy region set off every day for their peaceful affairs, has become another target of the terrorist country,” Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said on Telegram.
At least another two civilians were killed in Kharkiv, a 65-year-old woman and a 46-year-old man, and two more in Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk, where houses and apartment buildings were struck, local governors said.
Ukraine still controls the city of Zaporizhzhia and the north of the region, but most of the south, including the nuclear plant has fallen under Russian occupation since the start of the more than four-year-old war.
The plant was struck Saturday, Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy company Rosatom reported.
“We are one step closer to an incident that will most likely affect even those who live far beyond the borders of Russia and Ukraine,” Rosatom head Alexei Likhachev said.
The explosion didn’t damage the main equipment, but caused a hole in the turbine hall wall of one of the units, Likhachev said, blaming Ukrainian drones for the strike.
Throughout the fighting, Russia and Ukraine have traded blame for strikes on the Zaporizhzhia plant, which needs reliable power to cool its six reactors and avoid a nuclear disaster.
The ongoing attacks come as President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that intelligence has information indicating Moscow is preparing for a new large-scale assault on Kyiv — and that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin was getting more emboldened to expand his attacks even beyond Ukraine’s borders.
“Russia is now threatening other nearby countries far more openly than before,” Zelensky wrote on social media Saturday, after Russia recalled its ambassador to Armenia over its effort to strengthen ties with the European Union — something Putin threatened would put Armenia at risk of the “Ukrainian scenario.”
Zelensky’s warning also follows a drone attack on an apartment building in Romania that wounded two people Thursday night, and sparked fears of other NATO countries joining the war.
Putin tried to deflect blame that’s been widely pinned on Russia.
“No one can determine the origin of any aircraft until a proper forensic examination of that aircraft has been conducted,” Putin claimed at a press conference in Kazakhstan Friday, the Moscow Times reported.
“If they provide us with any objective data … in that case, we will give our assessment of what happened.”
Drones have fallen on NATO countries bordering Ukraine before, but this week marked the first incident where it struck a building well inside a member’s borders.
With Post Wires
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