Russia steps up bombings in Ukraine ahead of EU sanctions meeting | World | T.W.

Six people were killed Monday (07.18.2022) in an explosion in the eastern Ukrainian city of Doretsk, where Moscow is intensifying its crackdown on a meeting in Brussels of EU foreign ministers seeking to step up pressure against Russia with new economic sanctions.

On the ground, shelling on a building in Doretsk, a city of about 30,000 people in the Donetsk region, killed six people, local officials said. Donetsk is one of two provinces that make up the Donbass mining basin, which Moscow wants to control.

The attack hit a building on the outskirts of the city known as the “Prayer House”, which housed Jehovah’s Witnesses before the war, said a neighbor about 30 meters away.

“I opened the window and there was a huge explosion around 5am, with stones and dust,” Nadejda told AFP, still shaking. A soldier barred from entering the building confirmed the balance, but declined to say whether it was even.

In the past 24 hours, two more people were killed in Russian shelling in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city near the Russian border, Governor Oleg Sinekubov said. Attacks were also reported in Mykolaiv and Odesa regions (south) and Nikopol (center) on the banks of the Dnieper River.

For his part, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov summarized that 250 “foreign mercenaries” were killed in Russian bombing of the Donetsk city of Konstantinovka.

On July 24, six months after the start of the war, the global balance of victims of the conflict is not present.

Pro-Russians say Chiverskin has “functional control.”

Meanwhile, pro-Russian militias from the Luhansk republic (east) this Monday claimed to have taken “operational control” of the town of Sivarsk, a key railway junction in Donetsk, which the Russians see as key to the advance. Attack in Donbass.

“Siversk is completely under our operational control. There is fighting in the city and its surroundings,” Vitaly Kiselyov, adviser to the Interior Minister of the Luhansk People’s Republic, was quoted as saying by Russian agency TASS. Monday.

In an earlier statement to Russian public television, Kislyov assured that Chiversk was under the control of separatist Luhansk militias.

Fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces for Siversk, located about 30 kilometers from Lisichansk, began in early July. Ukraine is currently not commenting on news of the possible fall of Síversk.

Meanwhile, military spokesman Eduard Basurin said the territory of the Donetsk region would come under the full control of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) by the end of the year.

“We have a certain progress, and as for the future, we will not give specific dates, but the liberation of Donbass will end this year,” he told Russian channel Rossiya 24.

A pro-Russian military representative pointed to Western weapons arriving on the front lines in recent weeks and destroying Russian arsenals behind the Ukrainian army’s rear. “We will seize or destroy whatever is brought, and not otherwise.

gs (afp, efe)