Russia targeted Ukraine’s Black Sea regions of Odessa and Mykolaiv with air strikes on Tuesday, hitting private buildings and port infrastructure along the country’s southern coast, the Ukrainian military said.
The Kremlin’s forces used air-launched missiles in the attack, Ukraine’s Operational Command South said in a Facebook post.
In the Odessa region, a number of private buildings in villages on the coast were hit and caught fire, the report said. In the Mykolaiv region, port infrastructure was targeted, according to Mayor Oleksandr Senkevich.
"A massive missile strike was launched on the south of Ukraine from the direction of the Black Sea, and with the use of aviation," he told Ukrainian state television, providing no details on the aftermath of the strike.
Hours after the renewed strikes on the south, a Moscow-installed official in the southern Kherson region said the Odessa and Mykolaiv regions will soon be "liberated" by the Russian forces, just like the Kherson region further east.
"The Kherson region and the city of Kherson have been liberated forever," Kirill Stremousov was quoted as saying by Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.
The developments came as Ukraine appeared to be preparing a counteroffensive in the south.
The Ukrainian military reported Russian cruise missile strikes in the south and that Ukrainian forces had hit enemy targets. Serhiy Bratchuk, a spokesperson from the military administration in Odessa, told a Ukrainian television channel that a missile fired from the direction of the Black Sea had struck the region, but gave no information on casualties.
Last Saturday, Russia struck another southern Ukrainian port of Odessa, casting doubt on a plan to restart Ukrainian grain exports.
The grain deal aims to allow safe passage for grain shipments in and out of Ukrainian ports, blockaded by Russia since its Feb. 24 invasion. Russia has blamed Ukraine for stalling shipments by mining the port waters.
A major fire broke out at an oil depot in the Budyonnovsky district of Russian-backed Donetsk People's Republic in eastern Ukraine after Ukrainian troops shelled the province, Russia's TASS reported, quoting a reporter at the scene. No casualties or injuries have been reported.
War crimes
Fighting rages on in the south and east of Ukraine as the appeal of the nation's first war crimes conviction was adjourned Monday. Vadim Shishimarin, a 21-year-old captured Russian soldier who pleaded guilty to killing a civilian and was sentenced in May by a Ukrainian court to life in prison, sat in a glass box in the courtroom as he faced news cameras. The hearing was postponed until July 29 due to his lawyer’s ill health.
Around Ukraine's capital region, where Russian forces pulled out four months ago, much of the work of documenting crime scenes and interviewing witnesses has been done. Now a more difficult phase in the search for accountability is underway: Finding those responsible.
Shishimarin’s case is unusual in that Ukrainian authorities quickly found evidence to link him with the shooting of a 62-year-old man in the northeastern Sumy region on Feb. 28. That’s not the case for most war crimes cases now under investigation.
Ukrainian prosecutors have registered over 20,100 potential war crimes, and police in the Kyiv region have exhumed more than 1,300 bodies.
But as of July, prosecutors in Ukraine have only been able to identify 127 suspects, according to the prosecutor general’s office. Fifteen of them are currently in Ukraine as prisoners of war while the rest remain at large. Those suspects include three accused of sexual violence and 64 accused of willful killing or ill-treatment of civilians.
Shishimarin is one of 10 people to face war crimes trials so far in Ukraine, in cases involving indiscriminate shelling, willful killing, sexual violence, robbery, ill-treatment of civilians and attacks on civilian objects. Six have been convicted, according to the prosecutor general’s office.
Ukraine’s top prosecutors have long argued for speedy trials – in part to meet a seething public hunger for justice – even as they work to maintain judicial standards that will satisfy domestic watchdogs and allies in the U.S. and Europe.
Victims of chaos and carnage in the early weeks of the war in Ukraine were buried haphazardly. All those bodies had to be dug up for forensic examination. Kyiv regional police have exhumed 1,346 bodies, but more than 300 people are still missing, according to Nebytov.
More than half of the victims police have found so far were shot dead; 38 of them were children. Kyiv police have found 13 mass graves in the region.