Russia yesterday said its forces had advanced in eastern Ukraine as Kyiv reported deadly air attacks and urged the West to allow it to carry out more retaliatory strikes inside Russia’s borders.
The attacks come as sources over the weekend said the US had informed allies that it believed Iran has transferred short-range ballistic missiles to Russia for its war in Ukraine, a claim Tehran denied.
Moscow has upped its aerial attacks in the past few weeks at the same time it tries to fight off a major Ukrainian cross-border offensive into its Western Kursk region that has reshaped the course of the two-and-a-half-year war.
Photo: Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty / Serhii Nuzhnenko via Reuters
Two people were killed yesterday in a Russian airstrike on Sumy, Ukraine, the capital of the region from where Ukraine poured troops and tanks across the border into Russia in its shock counterattack.
“As a result of the airstrike, two people died. Four more people were injured, including two children,” Sumy military authorities in the region said in a statement.
A Russian rocket strike on a village close to the front line in the Donetsk region also killed two people, the regional prosecutors’ office said yesterday.
Kyiv launched its Kursk offensive on Aug. 6 hoping to force Russia to redeploy troops pressing forward in the east of the country, but Moscow has appeared to intensify its attacks there, chalking up its most significant territorial gains in almost two years over last month.
Its military said it captured another small village as it advances toward the key logistics hub of Pokrovsk in the eastern Donetsk region.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy yesterday urged Kyiv’s partners to give him more scope to use Western-supplied weapons against targets inside Russia.
“In just one week, Russia has used more than 800 guided aerial bombs, nearly 300 Shahed drones and more than 60 missiles of various types against our people,” he wrote on Facebook.
“Terror can only be reliably stopped in one way: by striking Russian military airfields, their bases and the logistics of Russian terror,” he said.
Meanwhile, sources speaking on condition of anonymity did not offer any details about the alleged Iranian weapons transfer to Russia, including what had been delivered or when it might have occurred.
CIA Director William Burns, who was in London on Saturday for a joint appearance with British Secret Intelligence Service Chief Richard Moore, warned of the growing and “troubling” defense relationship involving Russia, China, Iran and North Korea that he said threatens Ukraine and Western allies in the Middle East.
The pair wrote in an op-ed published on Saturday in the Financial Times that the world was “under threat in a way we haven’t seen since the Cold War.”
Additional reporting by AP and Bloomberg
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