Latest on Ukraine and Visit of Secretaries of Defense and State
The American secretaries of state and defense will make a trip to the embattled Ukrainian capital, President Volodymyr Zelensky said (Probably today but not for sure). Russian missiles killed at least eight people in a residential area of Odesa.
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Marc Santora and
Russian forces on Saturday launched deadly missile strikes on targets in Odesa, hitting a residential neighborhood and inflicting the kind of civilian carnage the Black Sea port city had so far avoided in two months of fighting, Ukrainian officials said.
At least eight people were killed and another 18 wounded when two cruise missiles struck the residential area in the city’s west, and officials warned the toll would likely climb given the extent of the damage. The missile attacks were the first to strike Odesa since early April and also destroyed two Ukrainian military targets, according to a statement by Ukraine’s southern air defense forces.
The attacks dashed hopes that there would be a letup in the fighting for Easter, as many Ukrainians who attend Orthodox or Eastern Rite churches were preparing to celebrate on Sunday.
The strikes also came a day after a Russian general outlined a new set of military objectives for Moscow that included the seizing of all Ukrainian lands along the Black Sea. Capturing Odesa would be a critical part of that strategy.
“They call the apartment building a military installation,” the mayor of Odesa, Gennady Trukhanov, said on Telegram, adding that a 3-month-old child had been killed in the strike.
In Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky told reporters that the U.S. secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, and the defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, would visit Ukraine’s capital on Easter Sunday. There was no immediate confirmation from the Pentagon and the State Department in Washington.
In earlier remarks, he warned Russia in that Ukraine would be better able to defend itself now that its international allies were finally supplying the heavy weaponry the Ukrainian president had been asking for since the war began in late February.
In other major developments:
While Russia has failed to make any significant territorial gains in the east, the Ukrainian defense intelligence agency warned that Russian forces are trying to identify the Ukrainian military’s most vulnerable points in order to launch a large-scale offensive.
The Russians continued to pound military and civilian targets along the 300-mile long front line even as the Ukrainian military claimed to have repulsed multiple Russian thrusts and staged counterattacks to reclaim Russian-occupied communities.
Western allies were speeding up efforts to deliver heavy arms to Ukraine. Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain said on Friday that his country was considering sending tanks to Poland so that Warsaw could then send its own tanks to Ukraine. Canada announced that it had sent heavy artillery, including M777 howitzers and additional anti-armor ammunition, to Ukraine in conjunction with the United States.
Russian authorities opened a criminal case against Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian pro-democracy activist and a contributing columnist for The Washington Post, for spreading “false information” about the war in Ukraine, his lawyer said on Friday. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken called for his release.
Hackers claimed to have broken into dozens of Russian institutions over the past two months, including the Kremlin’s internet censor and one of its primary intelligence services, leaking emails and internal documents to the public.
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