Russia claimed on Tuesday to have “destroyed” two Ukrainian military ships in the Black Sea, the latest maritime skirmishes since it slammed the door of an agreement to export Ukrainian cereals.
Moscow also claimed to have repelled a new armed incursion from Ukraine into the border region of Bryansk and destroyed drones near the capital.
The Russian Defense Ministry said it sank a Ukrainian naval vessel in an area under its control and an American-made Ukrainian launch off Serpents’ Island, liberated last year from Kiev.
For almost a year, attacks in the Black Sea had become rarer, allowing the implementation of an agreement for Ukraine to export its agricultural production.
But Moscow withdrew from it in July, multiplying since the bombardments of Ukrainian port infrastructures.
Ukraine has targeted with drones the Russian fleet, an oil tanker or even the bridges leading to Crimea, annexed in 2014.
kyiv has also organized a maritime corridor for the “Joseph Schulte”, a cargo ship which reached Turkey last week without Russia attacking it.
And once again, Moscow says it repelled an armed incursion from Ukraine on Tuesday from its territory into the border region of Bryansk.
According to the governor, Alexandre Bogomaz, the authorities are “busy taking measures to ensure the safety of the inhabitants”.
The Russian border regions have been targeted on several occasions by incursions, generally claimed by units calling themselves Russian, opposed to the Kremlin and installed in Ukraine.
In addition, Russian territory is now targeted almost daily by drones attributed to kyiv. Early Tuesday, for the fifth day in a row, two craft were shot down over the Moscow region.
In Krasnogorsk, northwest of the capital, police cordoned off the perimeter near debris, according to an AFP photographer at the scene, where several windows of a building appear broken.
In the summer, aircraft were destroyed over Moscow’s business district and in May, two drones were shot down near the Kremlin.
This does not prevent the Russian army from continuing its campaign of bombing Ukraine, always claiming to aim at military targets but causing civilian deaths every day.
On Tuesday, the funeral of victims of a strike on a theater in Cherniguiv took place.
The families of those killed on Saturday came one by one to collect the bodies from the city morgue.
During a short ceremony, Nazar’s relatives came to pay homage to this 22-year-old young man, killed as he started his car to leave the parking lot just in front of the theater entrance.
“He was a sunny person,” Yevgenia Ivachentseva, one of his former teachers, told AFP. “He had such a smile that it was impossible not to respond to it.”
In the Holy Trinity Cathedral, a religious ceremony was held for 6-year-old Sofia, who died of her injuries in hospital.
Sitting on a chair near the small open white coffin, her mother remained motionless, her gaze fixed on the face of the little girl, dressed in a white dress, her blond hair tied with a ribbon of tulle.
On the theater square, workers covered the roofs blown up by the explosion with tarpaulins. Cafes, whose windows were destroyed, have reopened, but their windows are covered with plywood panels.
On the front, Ukraine continues its offensive to try to liberate the occupied south and east. But after more than eight weeks, the gains remain limited.
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said on Tuesday its 47th Brigade entered the village of Robotyne after weeks of fighting. However, the locality is not under control.
Authorities also conducted more than 200 raids on military enlistment centers in Ukraine on Tuesday to root out a vast system of corruption that allowed conscripts to escape the army.
On the diplomatic level, Volodymyr Zelensky took part in a regional summit in Greece, meeting his counterparts from Montenegro and Moldova, as well as the Prime Ministers of Croatia and North Macedonia.
Vladimir Putin, under an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC), has given up on going to South Africa at the summit of the Brics countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa ) which opened on Tuesday.
The Russian President will intervene by videoconference. His head of diplomacy Sergei Lavrov is on site.
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22/08/2023 20:52:33 – Moscow (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
