Russia attacks Ukraine: Russian forces strike key infrastructure along southern coast

Russian missiles battered key infrastructure along Ukraine’s southern coast on Sunday, Ukrainian officials said.

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Missiles pounded the Black Sea port cities of Odesa and Mykolaiv, the New York Times reported. Ukraine’s air defense southern command said it had intercepted a pair of Russian sea-based cruise missiles, the newspaper reported.

City officials said a fuel depot had been targeted but there were no reported casualties, according to The Guardian.

“This morning the enemy attacked Odesa from the air,” Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Lyudmila Denisova, wrote in a post on Telegram. “Critical infrastructure was affected,” she said, adding that a day earlier, Russian forces had damaged the Kremenchuk oil refinery in central Ukraine and fired on its surrounding fuel depots.

Russia’s Defense Ministry confirmed Sunday’s strikes, the Times reported. The agency said it destroyed an oil refinery and three oil depots around Odesa that “were used to resupply Ukrainian military units” near Mykolaiv.

In a message posted by Italian news agency ANSA, Italian photographer Carlo Orlandi said Odesa woke to military sirens at 5:45 a.m. local time Sunday, followed by the sounds of bombs falling from two aircraft, The Associated Press reported.

“We were woken up by the first explosion. Then we saw a flash in the sky, then another, then another. I lost count,” a resident, Mykola, 22, told Agence-France Presse.

Oleksandr Syenkevych, the mayor of Mykolaiv, said in a Facebook post that there were “several missile strikes” on the city, CNN reported adding that authorities were gathering information.

In a statement on Telegram, Vitaliy Kim, the head of the regional military administration, wrote that “I’ll tell you about the shelling tomorrow. Everything’s fine.”

Anton Herashchenko, an aide to Ukraine’s interior minister, said that local authorities had reported several rocket attacks on Mykolaiv, according to the BBC.

Odesa has long been considered a target for the Russian military, but it has been largely been spared from attacks, The Washington Post reported. Area businesses and even the zoo have reopened during the past week, the newspaper reported.

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