Russia has denied bombing the apartment building in Dnipro, in Ukraine. Moscow’s armed forces “do not target residential buildings,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, and quoted Alexei Arestovych, an adviser to the Ukrainian presidency, as saying the missile that hit Dnipro on Saturday was not intentionally fired at a building residential. “You have all seen the conclusions of certain Ukrainian officials who said that the tragedy was the result of an intercepted air defense missile,” Peskov said. Yesterday Arestovych, in an interview on Youtube with the Russian opponent Mark Feigin, said precisely that the Russian missile had fallen on the apartment building because it was intercepted by flak and for this he had been harshly criticized by the mayor of Dnipro, Borys Filatov.
And he also sent a message to the West: “The supply of heavy vehicles to Ukraine will not be able to change the situation on the ground. These tanks are burning and will continue to burn”. Finally, Peskov defined the news of the conflicts between the private Wagner military corps and the Russian Defense Ministry as “information manipulations”.
In the meantime it has risen to at least 40 the death toll from the Dnipro attack, as confirmed by local sources. Shortly before, the national police had spoken of 36 victims: “including two children, 75 injured (including 15 children) and 39 rescued (including six children)”.
The general secretary of theHim, Anthony Guterres, “condemned” the Russian attack against a residential building in Dnipro, in Ukraine, stating that it was another example of “suspected violation of the laws of war”. This was stated by a UN spokeswoman, Stephanie Tremblay. “A raid hit a residential building in Dnipro on Saturday evening, in one of the deadliest attacks in Ukraine since the start of the Russian invasion,” she told reporters. He underlined that the United Nations humanitarian coordinator in the country, Denise Brown, has called for “an effective investigation of suspected war crimes and the prosecution of suspects”. The toll is now 40 dead and at least 75 injured, but “they should increase as the relief operations continue”, and “more than a thousand people have been made homeless by this attack”.
Ukraine, the yellow kitchen symbol of the horror of Dnipro
The Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky intervened forcefully on the Dnipro massacre, condemning the “cowardly silence” of the Russian people. “Your cowardly silence, your attempt to wait out the end of what is happening, will only end in the fact that one day these same terrorists will come for you,” she said in her evening speech. Zelensky added that he has received many messages of sympathy from all over the world. And addressing the Russians in their own language, he noted “that even now they have not been able to utter words of condemnation of this terror”.
It is likely that the Kremlin wants “to take decisive action in the next six months” to regain control of the situation in Ukraine after a series of failures and successful Ukrainian counter-offensives: writes the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) in its latest update on the conflict, as reported by the Kyiv Independent. Russia has failed to achieve most of its main objectives in Ukraine, observe the experts of the American research center recalling that Moscow’s forces failed to capture Kiev in the first days of the invasion, as well as the entirety of the regions of Lugansk and Donetsk.
At the same time, Ukrainian troops have liberated more than 50% of Russian-occupied territory since February, including Kherson, the only regional capital that Russia had managed to conquer. The institute also comments that the Russian campaign to target critical Ukrainian infrastructure during the winter in an attempt to demoralize Ukrainians has also been a failure so far and in many ways has generated increased support for the Ukrainian cause.
Russian bombing also continues on the rest of the country. Three people were injured, including two children, in a rocket attack on the city of Zaporizhzhia, in south-eastern Ukraine, happened last night, city council secretary Anatoliy Kurtiev reported on Telegram. ‘Three people were transported to hospital. Among them are two children aged nine and fifteen,’ Kurtiev wrote, adding that rescue teams from the State Emergency Service, doctors and utility workers are working on the scene. Some infrastructure was destroyed in the attack.
Seven civilians were injured in yesterday’s shelling in the Donetsk region, in eastern Ukraine. The boss announced it on Telegram
of the regional military administration, Pavlo Kyrylenko. “On January 15, the Russians wounded seven civilians in the Donetsk region: two each in Bakhmut and Avdiivka, one
to Velyka Novosilka, Lyman and Soledar,” Kyrylenko wrote.
Three people died and 14 others were injured yesterday in the city of Kherson and in the region of the same name in southern Ukraine. The Russian army has attacked the territory of the region 90 times with multiple rocket launchers, mortars and tanks, Yanushevich said. In particular, the city of Kherson was bombed 21 times and residential neighborhoods were also hit. Yesterday the deputy head of the Ukrainian president’s office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, denounced that Russian forces also bombed “the premises where representatives of the Red Cross work” in Kherson.
Ukrainian forces “almost certainly” held positions at Soledar, north of Bakhmut, despite the intense weekend fighting: writes the British Ministry of Defense in its daily intelligence update on the situation in the country. Fights that have also affected the sector of
Kreminna, in the Lugansk region, the ministry specifies in its report published on Twitter. “Overall, the Ukrainian army continues to gradually advance its front line to the east, on the edge of the city of Kreminna,” he stresses.
“Over the past six weeks, both Russia and Ukraine have made hard-fought but limited gains in several sectors – conclude the London experts -. Under these circumstances, a key operational challenge for both sides is to generate troop formations. .. who can leverage tactical successes to create operational breakthroughs.”
