Latest developments
A previously announced meeting of a new NATO-Ukraine Council, expected to address Black Sea security, has been scheduled for Wednesday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said his country is capable of replacing Ukrainian grain exports to Africa after Russia left a deal allowing for safe shipments from Ukraine through the Black Sea amid Russia’s invasion.
Russia reported Ukrainian drone attacks Monday targeting Moscow and Russia-occupied Crimea, while Ukraine said Russia carried out its latest aerial attack on the southern port of Odesa.
Russia’s military said it downed the two drones that attacked Moscow. The city’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said two non-residential buildings were damaged, but that there were no reports of casualties.
Russian news agencies said fragments from a drone were found in the Komsomolsky area, near Russia’s defense ministry.
In Crimea, the Russia-installed governor said a Ukrainian drone strike hit an ammunition depot, while air defenses downed 11 drones.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s military said Russia destroyed a grain depot and injured four workers in the latest Russian attack on port infrastructure in Odesa.
Ukraine’s southern military command said it shot down three Russian drones that were part of Monday’s attacks.
Russia has hit Odesa multiple times in the week since it announced it was leaving the Black Sea Grain Initiative that allowed for the safe shipment of grain from Ukrainian ports through the Black Sea.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy used part of his nightly address Sunday to decry Russian attacks on the city of Odesa, and in particular its historic center, one of UNESCO’s world heritage sites.
Zelenskyy vowed to retaliate, saying, “They [Russia] will definitely feel this.”
“The target of all these missiles is not just cities, villages or people. Their target is humanity and the foundations of our entire European culture,” Zelenskyy said Sunday in his nightly video address. “Last night, a Russian missile — it was an X-22, an anti-ship missile — hit the altar of the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral in Odesa. … One of the most valuable cathedrals in Ukraine.”
Russian airstrikes damaged the historic Transfiguration Cathedral, as the site is also known, early Sunday.
Father Myroslav, the assistant rector of the cathedral, said there was extensive damage inside.
“There was a direct hit to the cathedral; it completely damaged three altars,” he said.
Members of the clergy pulled icons from the rubble inside the cathedral. Mosaics were smashed. A security guard and clergymen were inside when the strike hit, but they survived.
The destruction of the historic monument has caused outrage and Zelenskyy pledged to restore the historic church.
UNESCO issued a statement “strongly” condemning the attack. European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell condemned the strike as a “new war crime.”
The first and foremost church in the city of Odesa was founded in 1794 during the Russian empire. It was demolished under Stalin in 1936. Its rebuilding commenced in 1999 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and it was consecrated in 2003.
Blue Shield sites damaged
Separately, “a preliminary assessment in Odesa has revealed damage to several museums inside the World Heritage property, including the Odesa Archaeological Museum, the Odesa Maritime Museum and the Odesa Literature Museum. They had all been marked by UNESCO and local authorities with the Blue Shield, the distinctive emblem of the 1954 Hague Convention,” the UNESCO statement said.
Russia’s defense ministry claimed it struck areas that were suspected of being sites of terrorist acts but denied it had struck the cathedral and said the building had probably been hit by a Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile.
The airstrikes killed two people and wounded at least 19 others, including children.
Residents said the missiles hit only residential areas and small businesses.
Ukraine counteroffensive
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN Sunday that while Ukraine’s counteroffensive is going more slowly than originally hoped for, Ukrainian forces had reconquered half the territory that Russia had initially occupied when it invaded.
“It’s already taken back about 50% of what was initially seized,” Blinken said. “These are still relatively early days of the counteroffensive. It is tough.”
“It will not play out over the next week or two. We’re still looking I think at several months,” he said, as Ukrainian troops struggled to breach heavily entrenched Russian positions in the country’s south and east.
Blinken remarked that Russia has failed as far as what it was aiming to achieve when it invaded Ukraine.
“The objective was to erase Ukraine from the map, to eliminate its independence, its sovereignty, to subsume it into Russia. That failed a long time ago. Now Ukraine is in a battle to get back more of the land that Russia seized from it,” Blinken said.
Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Ukraine’s counteroffensive “has failed.”
While visiting St. Petersburg, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, a key Putin ally, said Sunday, “There is no counteroffensive.”
Putin replied: “It exists, but it has failed.”
Some information was provided by The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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