The former spies who wield power in Moscow have repeatedly warned of the risk of a Russia-NATO conflict as the West’s post-Cold War dominance wanes, Russia lays to rest the humiliations of the Soviet collapse, and China rises to superpower status.
The speech came as a Russian rocket struck a village cafe and store in eastern Ukraine today, killing at least 50 civilians in one of the deadliest attacks in months, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky and other top officials in Kyiv.
Zelensky today attended a summit of about 50 European leaders in Spain to drum up support from Ukraine’s allies.
He denounced the attack in the village of Hroza as a ‘demonstrably brutal Russian crime’ and ‘a completely deliberate act of terrorism’.
Presidential chief of staff Andrii Yermak and Kharkiv Governor Oleh Syniehubov said a six-year-old boy was among the dead, adding that seven other people were wounded.
Hroza, which had a population of about 500 before the war, is located in the northeastern Kharkiv region.
About 60 people were in the cafe were attending a wake after a funeral, said Internal Affairs Minister Ihor Klymenko, speaking on national TV.
According to preliminary information from Kyiv, the village was struck by an Iskander missile. Emergency crews were searching the rubble of damaged buildings.
Ukrainian prosecutors released pictures showing bloodied bodies and emergency workers combing through the building’s smouldering debris.
Hroza and other parts of the eastern Kharkiv region were seized by Russia early in the war and recaptured by Ukraine in September 2022.
The village is located only 30 kilometres (19 miles) west of Kupiansk.
Zelensky had visited the area on Tuesday to meet with troops and inspect equipment supplied by the West.
Earlier today, Russia targeted Ukraine’s southern regions with drones. Ukraine’s air force said that the country’s air defenses intercepted 24 out of 29 Iranian-made drones that Russia launched at the Odesa, Mykolaiv and Kirovohrad regions.
Andriy Raykovych, head of the Kirovohrad regional administration, said that an infrastructure facility in the region was struck and emergency services were deployed to extinguish a fire. He said there were no casualties.
In other Russian attacks on Ukraine in the past day, two civilians were killed in shelling of the southern city of Kherson and another one died after a Russian strike on the city of Krasnohorivka in the eastern Donetsk region.
At least eight people were wounded by Russian shelling, according to Ukraine’s presidential office.
A Russian strike on a hospital in the city of Beryslav in the Kherson region ravaged the building and wounded two medical workers, according to the regional administration chief, Oleksandr Prokudin.
Ukraine, in turn, has struck back at Russia with regular drone attacks across the border.
Roman Starovoit, the governor of Russia’s Kursk region that borders Ukraine, said that Ukrainian drones attacked infrastructure facilities in several areas, resulting in power cuts.
Starovoit also said that Ukrainian forces fired artillery at the border town of Rylsk, wounding a local resident and damaging several houses.
At the summit in Granada, Zelensky asked for more Western support, saying that ‘Russian terror must be stopped’.
Source: Daily Mail Online
