Missile strike on east Ukraine city kills at least nine

Kai Pfaffenbach and Manuel Ausloos | April 15, 2023

A Russian missile strike has killed nine people in eastern Ukraine as a British assessment says Ukrainian troops have been forced to withdraw from parts of the city of Bakhmut, the focus of Moscow’s slow advance through the region.

Ukrainian troops have been doggedly defending Bakhmut, shattered after months of shelling and bombardment. 

Ukrainian military commanders this week rejected as exaggerated Russian claims its forces now control 80 per cent of the city.

In Sloviansk, a city west of Bakhmut that Russia is seeking to capture, missile strikes on apartment buildings and other targets killed nine people and injured 20.

Regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko told national television seven missiles had been fired.

Two top floors collapsed in one building and rescuers searched for survivors into the night, pulling one woman in her seventies alive from the rubble. 

A child died on the way to a hospital after being rescued, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s office.

“The evil state once again demonstrates its essence,” Zelenskiy wrote on Telegram in a post accompanied by footage of the damaged building. 

“Just killing people in broad daylight. Ruining, destroying all life.”

Russia has repeatedly said it does not target civilian sites.

The assessment by Britain’s military said Russia had been pouring in new resources in a bid to capture Bakhmut, seen by Moscow as a stepping stone to capturing more territory in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, a major war aim.

Western countries have in the past pointed to acrimony between the Russian defence ministry (MoD) and the country’s main mercenary force Wagner as a significant Russian weakness.

“Russia has re-energised its assault on the Donetsk Oblast town of Bakhmut as forces of the Russian MoD and Wagner Group have improved co-operation,” Britain’s military said in a daily briefing note.

“Ukrainian forces face significant resupply issues but have made orderly withdrawals from the positions they have been forced to concede.”

Near Bakhmut, soldiers from a Ukrainian artillery unit were loading shells into a Soviet-era howitzer and firing towards the front line, where they said Russia had massed its foot soldiers.

“Our target in that direction is mostly infantry. There is a big concentration of the Russian Federation’s ‘human factor’,” said Dmytro, 44, the artillery unit’s commander. 

Bakhmut has been Russia’s main target in a massive winter offensive that has so far yielded scant gains despite infantry ground combat of an intensity unseen in Europe since World War II.

The British update said the Ukrainians still held western districts of the town but had been subjected to particularly intense Russian artillery fire in the previous 48 hours.

Wagner mercenary units were now focusing on advancing in the centre of Bakhmut, while Russian paratroopers were relieving them in attacks on the city’s flanks, it said.

The Institute for the Study of War think tank said geolocated footage indicated Russian forces had advanced further west into central Bakhmut the previous day and made “marginal advances” in the south and southwest of the city.

In Washington, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said “fruitful meetings this week” had secured promises of $US5 billion ($A7.5 billion) in extra funding to support Kyiv’s fight against Russia.

Shmyhal met with representatives of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the European Investment Bank, as well as top US officials, on the sidelines of the spring meetings of the IMF and the World Bank.