Russia has intensified its strikes on the southern Ukrainian area of Odesa, inflicting widespread energy cuts and threatening the area’s maritime infrastructure.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said Moscow was carrying out “systematic” attacks on the area. Last week, he warned that the focus of the struggle “may have shifted towards Odesa”.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said the repeated attacks were an attempt by Moscow to block Ukraine’s access to maritime logistics.
Earlier in December, Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to sever Ukraine’s access to the sea as retaliation for drone attacks on tankers of Russia’s “shadow fleet” in the Black Sea.
“Shadow fleet” is a time period that refers to a whole bunch of tankers used by Russia to bypass Western sanctions imposed after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
On Sunday night time in the Odesa area, strikes cut off electrical energy for 120,000 people and sparked a fire at a main port which destroyed dozens of containers of flour and vegetable oil.
It was the newest in a collection of a whole bunch of strikes which have disrupted energy provides in the area for days on finish and precipitated several casualties.
Last week, a ballistic missile strike on the Pivdenniy port east of Odesa killed eight people and injured at least 30.
Another attack earlier in the week killed a girl who was travelling in a car with her three kids and quickly cut off the Odesa area’s only bridge linking Ukraine and Moldova.
Zelensky indicated a new commander of the air power for the area would be chosen soon following the dismissal of Dmytro Karpenko over the weekend.
Odesa’s port has always been key for the nation’s financial system. The metropolis is Ukraine’s third largest after Kyiv and Kharkiv. It now occupies strategic significance as other ports in the Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Mykolayiv areas are inaccessible to Ukraine due to Russian occupation.
Despite the struggle, Ukraine stays one of the world’s prime exporters of wheat and corn.
Since August 2023, Odesa has been the start line of a essential hall that permits it to export grain out of the nation, following the coastlines of Romania and Bulgaria before reaching Turkey.
Zelensky, who has beforehand accused Russia of “sowing chaos” on the people of Odesa, said that “everyone must see that without pressure on Russia, they have no intention of genuinely ending their aggression”.
His feedback came as the newest spherical of US-led diplomatic efforts wrapped up in Miami. The US individually met the Ukrainian and Russian delegations, with the conferences yielding optimistic statements but no clear progress to deliver the finish of Moscow’s practically four-year struggle on Ukraine any nearer.
US President Donald Trump’s particular envoy Steve Witkoff said he and his Ukrainian counterpart Rustem Umerov had labored on “aligning positions” on a 20-point draft peace plan put ahead by Ukraine earlier this month. The plan is an different to a proposal offered by the US in November, which was seen as beneficial to Moscow.
Before Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev even returned to Moscow from Florida, Kremlin international coverage aide Yuri Ushakov instructed reporters that the European and Ukrainian adjustments to the peace proposal would not improve the probabilities of peace being achieved.
On Monday, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov accused EU nations of having a “firm aspiration” to derail potential Russia-US agreements on Ukraine and to “in general prevent Russia-American relations getting healthier”.
He also said European nations were “possessed by a maniacal” worry of a Russian attack. Russia was prepared to confirm in a legal settlement that it had no intention of attacking either the EU or Nato, Ryabkov added, echoing earlier feedback from Putin.
“We’ve never planned to [attack Europe], but if they want to hear it from us, well, let’s do it, we’ll put it in writing,” Putin said in November.
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