Ukraine hit by deadliest single Russian attack on civilians in weeks

Russian strikes in eastern Ukraine killed at least 10 people in the deadliest attack from President Putin in weeks - after promising to maintain conflict in the country.

Russia has carried out its most deadly attack on Ukraine in weeks, killing at least 10 civilians in the country’s east.

Russian strikes killed at least 10 people in eastern Ukraine, the deadliest single Russian attack on civilians in weeks, as President Vladimir Putin said he was preparing for a long, protracted conflict in the country.

A barrage of artillery fire struck the town of Kurakhove on Wednesday, hitting a market, a bus station and several residential buildings, according to Pavlo Kyrylenko, Ukraine’s governor of the Donetsk region, where the town is located. He posted a video on Telegram showing a row of destroyed shops.

Most fighting has been focused on the Donetsk region since both Ukraine and Russia shifted troops and arms there following the Russian retreat from the southern city of Kherson last month.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said 10 people had been killed and many more injured.

“The Russian army carried out a very brutal, absolutely deliberate strike at Kurakhove,” Mr. Zelensky said in his nightly video address. “Precisely at civilians. At ordinary people.” Russian officials haven’t commented on the strikes but have repeatedly said that they don’t target civilians.

President Zelensky condemned the latest targeted strikes from Russia which killed at least 10 people in eastern Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Russia released women’s basketball star Brittney Griner from a penal colony on Thursday, part of a negotiated prisoner release deal that exchanged her for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, U.S. officials said.

Elsewhere, the Kremlin said Thursday that Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula that Moscow has occupied since it annexed it in 2014, was vulnerable to Ukrainian attacks. Earlier Thursday, the governor of the largest city in the peninsula, Sevastopol, said the Russian military downed a drone in the sea.

“There are certainly risks, because the Ukrainian side continues its line of organising terrorist attacks,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

At a meeting Wednesday of a human-rights council, Mr. Putin defended the results of the war in Ukraine thus far, saying progress had been made.

Moscow had initially planned to take Kyiv within a few days of its February invasion, according to Ukrainian and Western intelligence, only to pull back and focus on seizing eastern Ukraine after its forces were repelled outside the capital.

“This might be a long process,” Mr. Putin said. He added, “New territories have appeared -- this is still a significant result for Russia.” He said millions of people live in the territories that Russia has seized and attempted to annex, and they will be brought into the Russian sphere. He also compared himself to Peter I, who ruled the Russian empire in the 17th and 18th centuries and is known as Peter the Great, noting that the czar also sought to control the Sea of Azov -- something Mr. Putin has now accomplished.

“The Sea of Azov has become an inland sea of the Russian Federation,” he said. On Thursday, Mr. Peskov said Russia would continue to “liberate” the territories in Ukraine that it has already claimed.

Mr. Putin said that -- at least for now -- there would be no additional mobilisation drive like the one that called an additional 300,000 Russian men into the military during the fall.

However, Ukrainian officials say that Russian-installed officials in the occupied territories are now calling Ukrainian men living in occupied territory into the Russian military.

In Melitopol, the largest city the Kremlin has captured in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, the general staff of the Ukrainian military said Russian officials had begun issuing summonses to men for military assignment in the near future.

“The Russian occupiers plan to mobilise local residents in order to replenish current losses,” the staff wrote in its daily update on Facebook.

Following Mr. Putin’s comments, Western analysts said it appeared he was trying to set conditions for a long-term conflict in Ukraine.

Firefighters extinguish a fire in a residential area of Bakhmut, Donetsk region amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“The Kremlin has been setting information conditions for the protraction of the war in Ukraine since the summer,” wrote the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank. “This informational conditioning is fundamentally incompatible with any discussions regarding a ceasefire or negotiations.” North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said he believed Russia was trying to freeze the conflict over the winter.

“What we see now is Russia is actually trying to have some kind of ‘freeze’ of this war at least for a short period of time to they can regroup, repair, recover,” Mr. Stoltenberg said on Wednesday at an event hosted by the Financial Times, according to a transcript released by NATO. “And then try to launch a bigger offensive next spring.” Elsewhere, the European Commission said Wednesday that it was preparing another round of sanctions on Russia. The package would add nearly 200 people to the sanctions list, target three Russian banks and seek to block imports that would allow other countries, like Iran, to make weapons that they then sell to Russia, according to Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission’s president.

“This package comes on top of the full EU import ban on Russian seaborne oil that came into force this week. As well as the global oil price cap agreed between the G7,” Ms. von der Leyen said in a statement. “The international cooperation against Russia’s war has never been stronger.”

WSJ