Russia expands attacks on civilian targets after battlefield losses

Fears are growing over what Vladimir Putin will do next as Joe Biden warns him against using non-conventional weapons.

Ukrainian soldiers ride infantry fighting vehicles at Novoselivka in the eastern Donetsk at the weekend. Picture: AFP

Russia is intensifying a campaign of long-range missile strikes targeting Ukraine’s key infrastructure after facing major setbacks on the battlefield that have raised concerns about further escalation from Moscow.

Britain’s Ministry of Defence said late on Sunday that Russian strikes had increasingly picked out civilian targets over the past week, even when no immediate military benefit could be perceived.

The aim, it said, was to “undermine the morale of the Ukrainian people and government”, which has been buoyed by the success of a recent offensive in the northeast of the country. The Ukrainian breakthrough in the Kharkiv ­region compelled Russian forces to relinquish more territory in a matter of days than they had gained in months of grinding combat, dramatically ­altering the ­momentum of the war.

Since then, Russian missiles have hit a dam, threatening to flood the city of Kryvyi Rih days after electricity in much of eastern Ukraine was knocked out by a strike that disabled the main power station in the country’s second-largest city of Kharkiv. A sustained Russian effort to destroy Ukrainian power stations, dams, bridges and pipelines could over time severely degrade the country’s ability to function, especially as winter sets in.

The General Staff of the Ukrainian armed forces said on Sunday night that over the previous 24 hours, the Russian military launched six missile strikes and 28 airstrikes at military and civilian targets. It said infrastructure in more than 30 settlements was damaged, near the front lines and often further into Ukrainian-held territory.

Speaking during a regional summit in Uzbekistan on Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia had launched several warning strikes in response to Ukraine’s offensive, in which Kyiv reclaimed some 5600sq km of territory, and there could be a more serious response in the future.

“More recently, the Russian armed forces delivered a couple of sensitive strikes, we will assume that they are a warning,” he said. “If the situation continues to ­develop in this way, then the ­response will be more serious.”

The recent strikes came as Ukrainian investigators uncovered evidence of what they say are war crimes in and around the city of Izyum after Russian forces were expelled from most of the northeastern Kharkiv region. Ukrainian authorities also found what they described as torture chambers there.

The work of exhuming more than 400 graves continues, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said, adding that some of the victims had already been identified. Investigators have hesitated to assign causes of death for the people buried in Izyum but have said some bodies showed ­traces of torture.

In his nightly address, Ukrain­ian President Volodymyr Zelensky welcomed a planned visit by a UN team to the gravesite in a forest at the edge of Izyum. There is evidence that Russian soldiers dug in nearby had shot at the graves “just for fun”, he said.

Police in the Kharkiv region have so far documented what they said were 241 alleged war crimes committed by the Russian military in towns and villages retaken from Russian forces. The Kremlin has said little about the alleged atrocities in Kharkiv. Leonid Slutsky, head of the Russian parliament’s international affairs committee, on Friday dismissed them as ­“another low-grade provocation and lie, devoid of any originality”.

As concerns grew over what shape further Russian strikes might take, US President Joe Biden was asked during an interview on 60 Minutes what he would say to Mr Putin if he was considering using chemical or tactical ­nuclear weapons. “Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. It would change the face of war unlike anything since World War II,” he said.

Russian officials have repeatedly dismissed suggestions that the country might use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. If Moscow did resort to using unconventional weapons, the US response would be “consequential”, Mr Biden said, though he wouldn’t provide more details. “They’ll become more of a pariah in the world than they ever have been,” he said.

Hundreds of Russian soldiers were taken prisoner during the ­offensive in Kharkiv, Mr Zelensky told Reuters. Kyiv will seek to ­exchange them for Ukrainian prisoners of war, who Mr Zelensky said outnumber the Russians held captive.

The Wall Street Journal