ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine (AP) — Russian troops pounded away at the vital port of Odesa, Ukrainian officials said Tuesday, an apparent effort to disrupt the supply lines and weapons shipments that have been critical to Kyiv’s defense.
By ELENA BECATOROS and JON GAMBRELL ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine (AP) — Russian troops pounded away at the vital port of Odesa, Ukrainian officials said Tuesday, an apparent effort to disrupt the supply lines and weapons shipments that have been critical to Kyiv’s defense. Ukraine’s ability to stymie a larger, better armed Russian military has surprised many observers, who had anticipated a much quicker conflict. With the war now in its 11th week and Kyiv bogging Russian forces down and even staging a counteroffensive, Ukraine’s foreign minister appeared to suggest that the country could expand its aims beyond merely pushing Russia back to areas it or its allies held on the day of the Feb.24 invasion. One of the most dramatic examples of Ukraine’s ability to deny Russia easy victories has been Mariupol, where Ukrainian fighters remain holed up at a steel plant, denying Russia’s full control of the city. The regiment defending the plant said Tuesday that Russian war planes continued pounding it. In recent days, the United Nations and Red Cross organized a dramatic rescue of what some officials said were the last civilians trapped at the plant. But on Tuesday, two officials said about 100 were believed to still be in the complex’s underground tunnels. Others said that was impossible to confirm. In another harrowing example of the grisly toll the war continues to take, the Ukrainians said they found the bodies of 44 civilians in the rubble of a building in the northeast that was destroyed weeks ago. The Ukrainian military said Tuesday that Russian forces fired seven missiles a day earlier from the air at Ukraine’s largest port, Odesa, hitting a shopping center and a warehouse. One person was killed and five were wounded, the military said. Images overnight showed a burning building and detritus — including an abandoned tennis shoe — in a heap of destruction in the city on the Black Sea. At daybreak, Mayor Gennady Trukhanov visited the warehouse and said it “had nothing in common with military infrastructure or military objects.” Ukraine alleged at least some of the munitions used dated back to the Soviet era, making them unreliable in targeting. But the Center for Defense Strategies, a Ukrainian think tank tracking the war, said Moscow used some precision weapons against Odesa: Kinzhal, or “Dagger,” hypersonic air-to-surface missiles.
