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EKO HOT BLOG reports that Russia launched fresh missile strikes on Kyiv during a visit by UN Secretary General on Thursday evening.
The attack comes after Putin’s forces withdrew from the capital after failing to take it weeks on from launching his failing invasion.
One of the blasts hit the lower floor of a residential building in the central Shevchenko district, injuring at least 10 people, officials said.
According to a Telegram message from Ukraine’s State Emergency Service, a 25-storey building was ‘partially destroyed as a result of enemy shelling’ on Kyiv.
The message said: ‘According to preliminary data, five people were rescued and ten were injured,’ adding that the figures were still being verified.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed five Russian missiles ‘flew into the city’.
Blasts were heard barely an hour after he held a news conference with Antonio Guterres, the visiting UN secretary general.
‘This says a lot about Russia’s true attitude to global institutions, about the efforts of the Russian leadership to humiliate the UN,’ Zelensky said in his nightly address to the nation.
He said the strikes proved the country ‘cannot let its guard down’ and ‘still had to fight’.
Kyiv has enjoyed relative calm since Russian invasion forces failed to capture it in the face of stiff Ukrainian resistance and withdrew several weeks ago to regroup in the east.
However it remains vulnerable to longer-range Russian heavy weaponry.
A spokesman for Guterres said one rocket landed near the hotel where he is staying, but that his team are safe.
The spokesman said that the UN delegation was meeting the prime minister in his office and were not in the hotel at the time.
Several politicians condemned the attack.
Foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said: ‘By this heinous act of barbarism Russia demonstrates once again its attitude towards Ukraine, Europe and the world.’
Oleksii Reznikov, the Ukrainian defence minister, also condemned the missile strikes, writing:
‘This is an attack on the security of the Secretary General and on world security!’
The blasts occurred after Guterres completed talks with Zelensiky focusing on efforts to evacuate civilians from the Russian-besieged southern port of Mariupol.
Guterres told Portuguese broadcaster RTP when asked about the blasts: ‘There was an attack on Kyiv…it shocked me, not because I’m here but because Kyiv is a sacred city for Ukrainians and Russians alike.’
Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, said the blasts were ‘proof that we need a quick victory over Russia…We must act quickly – more weapons, more humanitarian efforts…because every day Ukraine pays a high price for the protection of democracy and freedom.’
After being beaten back in efforts to capture Kyiv in the north, Russia has shifted forces hundreds of miles eastward to capture two provinces in a battle the West believe may prove a decisive turning point in the war.
Russian forces are now entrenched in the east, where Moscow-backed separatists have held some territory since 2014, and also hold a swathe of the south they seized in March
UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is understood to see the war as a long haul, expecting that it could realistically last up to five years – or even as long as a decade.
In a major speech yesterday, she called for Russia’s invasion to be a catalyst for the West’s approach to international security to be completely overhauled.
FURTHER READING:
The fresh attacks on Kyiv come as Putin ramps up his nuclear threats to the west.
Russian state TV has said the possibility of nuclear war is more likely than Vladimir Putin losing the conflict, with one mouthpiece for the Kremlin saying: ‘We’re all going to die someday.’
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