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Ukraine’s top commander has said Kyiv’s forces control 1,000 sq km of Russian territory as they press their biggest cross-border incursion in two-and-a-half years of full-scale war.
Commander Oleksandr Syrskyi said Ukraine continued to “conduct an offensive operation in the Kursk region” seven days after it began.
Russia launched dozens of missiles at cities across Ukraine on Monday in an attack that killed at least 31 people and smashed into a children’s hospital in Kyiv, officials said. The rare day-time Russian barrage came as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was due in Warsaw, the Polish government said, before he flies to a NATO summit in Washington.
Explosions rang out and black smoke could be seen rising from the centre of Kyiv, AFP journalists reported.
Russia announced on Monday the capture of a village in the southern part of the eastern Donetsk region. The Defense Ministry reported that its forces “continued to advance into the depths of the enemy’s defense and liberated the settlement of Staromaiorskoye” (known as Staromaiorske in Ukrainian), situated southwest of the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk.
Ukrainian forces took over the village near the southern Zaporizhzhia region in July of the previous year during their summer counteroffensive.
Armed clashes occurred overnight in New Caledonia, a French overseas territory. This was reported by High Commissioner Louis Le Franc, the representative of the Paris government, during a press conference.
“Large caliber weapons, hunting rifles, were used to shoot at the gendarmes,” said Le Franc, according to whom “there were no deaths”.
Fierce fighting has continued for a second day on the fringes ofthe Kharkiv region in north-east Ukraine. Moscow said it had captured five villages, while Kyiv said it was pushing back against the attacks and battling for control of the territory.
Russia launched the armoured incursion early on Friday, in an attack that may presage a broader push into the Kharkiv region, or aim to draw away overstretched Ukrainian forces in the east where Moscow’s offensive is focused.