Seven people — including a 23-day-old girl — were killed in Russian shelling in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region on Sunday, the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs said.
Artillery shelling in the village of Shiroka Balka, on the banks of the Dnieper River, killed a family — a husband, wife, 12-year-old boy and 23-day-old girl — and another resident.
Two men were killed in the neighboring village of Stanislav, where a woman was also wounded.
Photo: AFP / Handout / Ukrainian Emergency Service
The attack on Kherson Province followed Ukrainian Deputy Minister of Defense Hanna Maliar’s comments on Saturday attempting to quell rumors that Ukrainian forces had landed on the occupied east bank of the Dnieper River in the Kherson region.
“Again, the expert hype around the left bank in the Kherson region began. There are no reasons for excitement,” she said.
Kherson Governor Oleksandr Prokudin on Sunday said that three people had been wounded in Russian attacks on the province on Saturday.
Elsewhere, Ukrainian military officials said that Kyiv’s forces had made progress in the south, claiming some success near a key village in the southern Zaporizhzhia region and capturing other unspecified territories.
The Ukrainian General Staff said that it had “partial success” around the tactically important Robotyne area in the Zaporizhzhia region, a key Russian stronghold that Ukraine needs to retake to continue pushing south toward Melitopol.
“There are liberated territories. The defense forces are working,” General Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, commander of Ukraine’s southern forces, said of the southern front.
Battles have taken place on multiple points along the more than 1,000km front line as Ukraine wages a counteroffensive with Western-supplied weapons and Western-trained troops against Russian forces who invaded nearly 18 months ago.
Ukrainian troops have made only incremental gains since launching a counteroffensive in early June.
Meanwhile, a Russian warship on Sunday fired warning shots at a Palau-flagged cargo ship in the southwestern Black Sea, the first time Russia has fired on a merchant ship beyond Ukraine since exiting a landmark UN-brokered grain deal last month.
The Russian Ministry of Defense said that the Sukru Okan was heading northward to the Ukrainian Danube River port of Izmail.
“The captain of the dry-cargo ship did not respond to the request to stop for inspection for the carriage of prohibited goods. To force the ship to stop, warning fire was opened from automatic small arms from a Russian warship,” the ministry wrote on Telegram, adding that the ship later stopped and allowed an inspection team to board.
Four weeks ago, Moscow withdrew from a key export agreement that allowed Ukraine to ship millions of tonnes of grain across the Black Sea for sale on world markets. In the wake of that withdrawal, Russia carried out repeated strikes on Ukrainian ports, including Odesa, and declared wide areas of the Black Sea unsafe for shipping.
In Russia, local officials on Sunday reported that air defense systems shot down three drones over the Belgorod region and one over the neighboring Kursk region, both of which border Ukraine.
Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian border regions are a fairly regular occurrence. Drone attacks deeper inside Russian territory have been on the rise since a drone was destroyed over the Kremlin in early May.
Firing drones at Russia, after more than 17 months of war, has little apparent military value for Ukraine, but the strategy has served to unsettle Russians and bring home to them the conflict’s consequences.
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