KYIV, Ukraine, 17 Apr: Three Russian missiles slammed into a downtown area of the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv on Wednesday, hitting an eight-floor apartment building and killing at least 14 people, authorities said.
\nAt least 61 people, including two children, were wounded in the morning attack, Ukrainian emergency services said. Chernihiv lies about 150 kilometers (90 miles) north of the capital, Kyiv, near the border with Russia and Belarus, and has a population of around 250,000 people.
\nThe latest Russian bombardment came as the war stretched into its third year and approached what could be a critical juncture as a lack of further military support from Ukraine\u2019s Western partners increasingly leaves it at the mercy of the Kremlin\u2019s bigger forces.
\nThrough the winter months, Russia made no dramatic advance along the 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line, focusing instead on attritional warfare. However, Ukraine\u2019s shortage of artillery ammunition, troops and armored vehicles has allowed the Russians to gradually push forward, military analysts say.
\nA crucial element for Ukraine is the holdup in Washington of approval for an aid package that includes roughly $60 billion for Ukraine. House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday that he would try to move the package forward this week.
\nUkraine\u2019s need is now acute, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank.
\n\u201cThe Russians are breaking out of positional warfare and beginning to restore maneuver to the battlefield because of the delays in the provision of U.S. military assistance to Ukraine,\u201d the ISW said in an assessment late Tuesday.
\n\u201cUkraine cannot hold the present lines now without the rapid resumption of U.S. assistance, particularly air defense and artillery that only the U.S. can provide rapidly and at scale,\u201d it said.
\nUkrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has pleaded with Western countries to provide his country with more air defense equipment, including more surface-to-air Patriot guided missile systems. He said the Chernihiv strike \u201cwould not have happened if Ukraine had received enough air defense equipment and if the world\u2019s determination to counter Russian terror was also sufficient.\u201d
\nZelenskyy told PBS in an interview broadcast earlier this week that Ukraine recently ran out of air defense missiles while it was defending against a major missile and drone attack that destroyed one of Ukraine\u2019s largest power plants, part of a recent Russian campaign targeting energy infrastructure.
\nUkrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba repeated Zelenskyy\u2019s appeal for more help as he prepared to attend a Group of Seven foreign ministers\u2019 meeting in Italy.
\n\u201cWe need at least seven more Patriot batteries to protect our cities and economic centers from destruction,\u201d Kuleba told German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung in an interview published Wednesday. \u201cWhy is it so difficult to find seven Patriot batteries?\u201d
\nUkrainian forces are digging in, building fortifications in anticipation of a major Russian offensive that Kyiv officials say could come as early as next month.
\nUkraine is using long-range drone and missile strikes behind Russian lines which are designed to disrupt Moscow\u2019s war machine.
\nRussia\u2019s defense ministry said Wednesday that a Ukrainian drone was shot down over the Tatarstan region early Wednesday. That\u2019s the same area that was targeted in early April by Ukraine\u2019s deepest strike so far inside Russia, about 1,200 kilometers (745 miles) east of Ukraine. AP<\/p>\n
Ukrainian drone developers have been extending the weapons\u2019 range.
\nAnother Ukrainian drone was shot down over the Mordovia region, roughly 350 kilometers (220 miles) east of Moscow, the ministry said. That is 700 kilometers (430 miles) from the Ukrainian border.
\nAbout an hour before that Mordovia attack, Russia\u2019s civil aviation authority halted flights at airports in two of the country\u2019s largest cities, Nizhny Novgorod and Tatarstan\u2019s Kazan, because of safety concerns.
\nAlso, unconfirmed reports said a Ukrainian missile struck an airfield in occupied Crimea. Neither Russian nor Ukrainian officials confirmed the strike, but local authorities temporarily closed a road where the airfield is located. Russian news agency Tass quoted the local mayor as saying windows in a mosque and a private house in the region were shattered in a blast there. AP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
KYIV, Ukraine, 17 Apr: Three Russian missiles slammed into a downtown area of the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv on Wednesday, hitting an eight-floor apartment building and killing at least 14 people, authorities said. At least 61 people, including two children, were wounded in the morning attack, Ukrainian emergency services said. Chernihiv lies about 150 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-239037","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239037\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}