More Deadly Russian Missile Strikes, but Ukraine Hammers Back

The violence and destruction in Ukraine is showing no signs of a summer slowdown, as Russia fires more rockets at civilian targets and Ukraine ramps up its counterattacks, particularly in the country’s southern Black Sea perimeter. With heavy fighting ongoing in Donetsk, part of the embattled eastern Donbas region, Russia overnight on Wednesday launched 80 Grad rockets at Marhanets in the central Dnipropetrovsk region. There were conflicting reports as to the number of casualties; a local official said 13 people were killed and 11 injured in the strikes on the town. President Zelensky said in his nightly video address that Kyiv “will not leave today’s Russian shelling of the Dnipropetrovsk region unanswered,” and said Ukraine and its allies now should think about “how to inflict the greatest possible losses on the occupiers in order to shorten the war.”Russia’s rocket assault was about a dozen miles from the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, where Ukrainians and Russians have traded accusations about fighting that has increased the risk of damage to the plant, with the prospect of another Chernobyl-style nuclear disaster looming large. Earlier this week the UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, called for international inspectors to be given access to the Zaporizhzhya plant.After last night’s rocket attacks, Mr. Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, said on Twitter that “the Russian troops can’t win battles, so they keep attacking the cities, hiding at the Zaporizhzhya NPP facilities and blackmailing the world with nuclear incidents.” According to the Times of London, the BM-21 Grad, meaning “hail” in Russian, “is a multiple-launch rocket system capable of firing 40 rockets in under 20 seconds.” Although it is often imprecise, “it is still capable of causing significant destruction.”The increasing Russian attacks are only hardening Ukraine’s resolve. A top military advisor to Mr. Zelensky, Oleksiy Arestovych, said that this week’s attack on the Novofedorivka airfield, a Russian base in Crimea 125 miles behind enemy lines, was only the beginning of Ukrainian strikes on Russian targets in the strategic peninsula that Russia illegally annexed in 2014. The Telegraph reported that Mr. Arestovych said that the next round of strikes were likely to happen “in the coming days,” but even without a pronouncement it is clear that Kyiv’s widely anticipated counteroffensive in Ukraine’s south is now under way. More attacks against Russian targets in Crimea can be expected, as well as Russian responses that will not necessarily be limited to the peninsula itself. Between the Biden administration’s pledge of another $1 billion in military aid for Ukraine, which will include more rockets and ammunition, and Britain’s ongoing provision of sophisticated weaponry, Ukraine’s military is getting the boost that may yet tip the scales in its favor. On Thursday the British defense secretary, Ben Wallace, announced that additional M270 rocket launchers were on their way to Ukraine, the Telegraph reported. They are said to be the British army’s most advanced missile system. In addition to the launchers, Mr. Wallace said that a “significant number of precision-guided missiles” are also about to be supplied to Ukraine. On Wednesday, Ukraine’s South Operational Command said its troops had killed 41 Russian soldiers and damaged an unspecified amount of Russian military equipment. The command also said that Ukrainian bomber aircraft attacked two Russian ammunition warehouses and equipment in the Bashtanka district of the Mykolaiv region. Less than 60 miles southeast of Mykolaiv is Kherson, the Russian-occupied port that is expected to be the focal point of Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the coming days. Although it may not be a stated aim of Ukraine’s military, the more it can pummel Moscow’s applecart in and around Crimea — territory that Vladimir Putin seems less capable of defending than he previously thought — the better chances it will have of ejecting the Russians from Kherson. Either way, from Ukraine the many guns and rockets of August will likely be heard around the world.

More Deadly Russian Missile Strikes, but Ukraine Hammers Back

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