A cry of anger, when the forces of kyiv face an "extremely difficult" situation in Lyssytchansk, a key city in the battle of Donbass.
Late Friday night, Ukraine denounced "deliberate Russian terror" and renewed calls for Western anti-missile systems after deadly strikes in the Odessa region.
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According to the Ukrainian military and civil authorities, at least 21 people, including a 12-year-old boy, were killed before dawn on Friday by three Russian missiles which destroyed "a large building" and "a tourist complex" in Sergiyivka, a town on the Black Sea coast, about 80 km from Odessa, in southern Ukraine.
"Not the slightest military target" at the location of the strikes
"This is deliberate Russian terror and not a few mistakes or an accidental missile strike", denounced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday evening, while local authorities assure that "there was no not the slightest military target" at the location of the strikes.
In response to the Ukrainian accusations, the Kremlin assured that "the armed forces of Russia do not operate on civilian targets" in Ukraine, a reaction described as "inhuman and cynical" by Berlin.
According to kyiv, the strikes on Sergiyivka injured 38 people, including five children, two of them in serious condition.
“I call on our partners to provide Ukraine with missile defense systems as soon as possible.
Help us save lives,” Foreign Minister Dmytro Kouleba pleaded once again on Twitter, calling Russia a “terrorist state.”
According to the Ukrainian army, the weapons used against Serguiïvka are Soviet cruise missiles dating from the Cold War and designed to strike a carrier battle group, the same type as those which struck a shopping center in Kremenchuk (center of Ukraine) in broad daylight on Monday. Ukraine, 200 km from the front) and having killed at least 19 people according to the last, still provisional, relief report.
Four civilians killed and 12 injured in Sloviansk
Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged that the situation remained "extremely difficult" in Lyssytchansk, industrial Donbass, where most of the fighting is concentrated and where the Russians "are trying to encircle" the Ukrainian army "from the south and from the west “, according to the local governor.
In its daily morning update on the situation on the front, the Ukrainian general staff affirms this Saturday that "the Russians led an offensive [towards a locality a few kilometers west of the city], without success, and are withdrawn”.
On Friday, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that its forces "had arrived at the gates of Lysytchansk" and inflicted "heavy losses" on the Ukrainian army.
Lyssychansk is the last major city not yet in Russian hands in the Lugansk region.
About sixty kilometers further west, in Sloviansk, a city in Donbass, a rocket attack hit inhabited houses on Friday evening, causing the death of a woman who was in her garden and injuring her husband, said this Saturday morning a neighbor to an AFP journalist showing the damage caused to buildings in the neighborhood.
According to the governor of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, four civilians have been killed and 12 injured in Sloviansk since Friday morning.
