Day: June 24, 2024
Moscow’s defence ministry blames Washington for attack which killed four and injured 151, saying US specialists set missiles’ flight coordinates
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine. The time has just gone past 10:35am in Kyiv.
Russia claimed on Sunday that the US was responsible for a Ukrainian attack on the Russian-annexed Crimean peninsula in which five US-supplied missiles that killed four people, including two children, and injured 151 more. These figures have not been independently verified by the Guardian.
Responsibility for the deliberate missile attack on the civilians of Sevastopol is borne above all by Washington, which supplied these weapons to Ukraine, and by the Kyiv regime, from whose territory this strike was carried out.
A Russian attack on Ukraine’s southern city of Odesa on Monday struck civilian infrastructure and caused casualties, the region’s governor said. Ukraine’s interior ministry published photographs of a massive cloud of smoke rising from the site where emergency services were working to put out a fire.
Vladimir Putin thanked North Korean leader Kim Jong-un for his hospitality during the visit to Pyongyang last week which Putin said brought bilateral ties to an unprecedented level, the Kremlin said.
Senior officials of South Korea, the US and Japan condemned “in the strongest possible terms” deepening military cooperation between North Korea and Russia, saying Putin’s recent visit to Pyongyang triggered grave concern, a joint statement released by Seoul’s foreign ministry said on Monday.
A top North Korean military official criticised the US over its expanding military assistance to Ukraine, according to state media, KCNA. Pak Jong Chon reportedly said Russia has the “right to opt for any kind of retaliatory strike”, adding if Washington kept pushing Ukraine to a “proxy war” against Russia, it could provoke a stronger response from Moscow, and a “new world war”. He referred to comments by the Pentagon last week that Ukrainian forces can use US supplied weapons to strike Russian forces anywhere across the border into Russia.
One person was killed and three injured in Russia’s Belgorod region, bordering Ukraine, when three Ukrainian drones attacked the city of Grayvoron, regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said. Air defences overnight shot down 33 Ukrainian drones over Russia’s western Bryansk, Smolensk, Lipetsk and Tula regions, the Russian defence ministry said Sunday.
A new attack on Kharkiv killed at least one person and injured 11 others on Sunday, according to local officials. Mayor Ihor Terekhov said the city was attacked by a guided bomb and that around half of Kharkiv was without electricity because of the strike.
Ukrainians are having to cope with widespread emergency blackouts as Russia continues to pound critical infrastructure.
