Reuters :
A Russian missile attack on a large Ukrainian military facility near the border with NATO member Poland on Sunday killed 35 people and wounded 134, a Ukrainian official said.
Ukraine said foreign military instructors have previously worked at the base, but a NATO official said there were no personnel from the alliance at the base. It was
not immediately clear whether any non-NATO states might have representatives there.
Regional governor Maksym Kozytskyy said Russian planes fired around 30 rockets at the Yavoriv International Center for Peacekeeping and Security, adding that some were intercepted before they hit. At least 35 people were killed and 134 wounded, he said. Reuters was not able to verify his statement.
The 360 square-km (140 square-mile) facility less than 25 km (15 miles) from the Polish border, is one Ukraine’s biggest and the largest in the western part of the country.
The Kremlin did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the reported missile strike so close to the border with NATO, and a short video briefing by Russia’s defence ministry spokesman on Sunday made no mention of such an attack.
Nineteen ambulances with sirens on were seen by Reuters driving from the direction of the Yaroviv facility after the reported strike and black smoke rose from the area.
“Russia has attacked the International Center for Peacekeeping & Security near Lviv. Foreign instructors work here. Information about the victims is being clarified,” Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov said in an online post.
A Ukrainian defence ministry representative told Reuters the ministry was still trying to establish if any foreign instructors were at the centre at the time of the attack.
Ukraine, whose aspirations to join NATO are a major irritant to Russian President Vladimir Putin, held most of its drills with countries in the Western defence alliance at the base before the invasion. The last major exercises were in September.
In the weeks before Russia invaded on Feb 24, the Ukrainian military trained there, but according to Ukrainian media, all foreign instructors left the training ground in mid-February, while leaving all the equipment.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, launched by Putin on Feb 24, has sent more than 2.5 millions fleeing across borders and trapped thousands of people in besieged cities.
While Western nations have sought to isolate Putin by imposing harsh sanctions, the United States and its allies are concerned to avoid NATO being drawn into the conflict. “There are no NATO personnel in Ukraine,” the NATO official said.
The mayor of another city in western Ukraine, Ivano-Frankivsk, said Russian troops also continued to hit its airport, with no initial reports of casualties.
In eastern Ukraine, Russian troops are trying to surround Ukrainian forces as they advance from the port of Mariupol in the south and the second city Kharkiv in the north, the UK Defence Ministry said on Sunday.
Kharkhiv has suffered some of the heaviest Russian bombardment. Videos from one resident, Teimur Aliev, who is helping bring aid to residents, show badly bombed buildings lining streets, burned out cars riddled with shrapnel holes and debris strewn across the ground.
“We will stitch up the wounds and the pain of our country and our city. We are ready to build it and we are ready to renew it when the war is over. We’re not going anywhere,” Aliev, a 23-year-old musician, said of his food distribution network, which now has dozens of volunteers.
The British intelligence also said Russian forces advancing from Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, were trying to circumvent Mykolaiv as they look to drive west towards Odesa. Air strikes on Mykolayiv killed nine people on Sunday, regional Governor Vitaliy Kim said in an online statement.
Air raid sirens again woke residents in Kyiv on Sunday morning, hours after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned Russian forces they face a fight to the death if they try to occupy the capital.
Ukraine accused Russian forces on Saturday of killing seven civilians, including one child, in an attack on women and children trying to flee fighting near Kyiv.
Reuters was unable immediately to verify the report and Russia offered no immediate comment.
Moscow denies targeting civilians. It blames Ukraine for failed attempts to evacuate civilians from encircled cities, an accusation Ukraine and its Western allies strongly reject.
The United States said it would rush up to $200 million in additional small arms, anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to Ukraine, where officials have pleaded for more military aid.
The Kremlin describes its actions as a “special operation” to demilitarise and “deNazify” Ukraine. Ukraine and Western allies call this a baseless pretext for a war of choice that has raised fears of wider conflict in Europe.
Polish President Andrzej Duda warned in an interview broadcast on Sunday that the use of chemical weapons in Ukraine by Russia would be a game changer and NATO would have to think seriously about how to respond.
Western officials said on Friday that Russia might use chemical weapons in Ukraine in a “false flag” attack to provide a retrospective justification for its invasion, but there was nothing to suggest a broader use of such weapons in the war.
The United States this week described renewed Russian accusations that Washington was operating biowarfare labs in Ukraine as “laughable” and suggested Moscow may be laying the groundwork to use a chemical or biological weapon.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Saturday the situation had been complicated by convoys of Western arms shipments to Ukraine that Russian forces considered “legitimate targets”.
In comments reported by the Tass news agency, Ryabkov made no specific threat. Any attack on such convoys before they reached Ukraine would risk widening the war.
Russian troops have destroyed 3,687 Ukrainian military infrastructure facilities so far, Russian Defence Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying on Sunday. It was not possible to independently verify his statement.
UNB adds: Russian Ambassador to Bangladesh Alexander V. Mantytskiy has slammed a section of Bangladesh media for what he said “biased approach” in their coverage of the situation in Ukraine and Russia’s actions there.
He described it as “deliberate efforts” to undermine Dhaka-Moscow relations, reports UNB.
“I consider the biased approach of certain Bangladeshi media towards the situation in Ukraine and Russia’s actions there as a result of deliberate efforts by those forces that have always sought to undermine mutually beneficial cooperation between the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, which started 50 years ago,” he said in an open letter to editors of print and electronic media, the heads of radio and TV broadcasters in Bangladesh on Sunday.
The ambassador referred to the 1971 when Bangladeshis overthrow, with the active support from India and the USSR, the dominance of non-Bengali masters, to stop harassment, discrimination and violence against Bengali people, so that they could finally enjoy the right to speak their native language.
He said the Russian-speaking people of Donbas in East Ukraine have been struggling to obtain the same right for eight years, while suffering from genocide unleashed by the Kiev regime.
The time is ripe for Russia to come to the rescue once again, for the same cause, to ensure the right to speak the mother tongue and to end language-based discrimination, said the Russian envoy.
“I hope that through my open letter your readers will be able to get acquainted with an alternative point of view towards the developments around Ukraine,” said the ambassador.
Against the backdrop of “anti-Russia campaign and blatant Russo-phobic hysteria” from western mainstream media, the ambassador said certain Bangladeshi newspapers and broadcasters “widely echoed and spread” those.
He said his letter to editors is an effort to explain to the Bangladeshi readers once again the goals and tasks behind the “special military operation” of the Russia in Ukraine.
According to the Ambassador, the goals are:
1. To protect Russian-speaking civilians in Ukraine subjected to genocide by the Kiev regime for eight years;
2. To eliminate Neo-fascism;
3. To prevent the development of nuclear weapons in Ukraine;
4. To stop the deployment of NATO military bases in Ukraine.
While tasks are:
1. To demilitarize and denazify Ukraine (to free it from Nazi ideology);
2. To put an end to Neo-fascism that has raised its head in Ukraine after being defeated in the Great Patriotic War.
3. To eliminate military threats on the border of the Russian Federation;
4. To disarm aggressive entities of Ukraine, posing threat to peaceful coexistence.
5. To identify and punish persons who have committed crimes against the civilian population of Ukraine and citizens of the Russian Federation by legal procedures in the courts of the Russian Federation.
“We do not plan to occupy Ukrainian territory. We are not at war with Ukrainian people. We do not intend to impose anything on anyone by force. We have explained many times that the situation in Ukraine has evolved in such a way that it has come to pose a direct threat to Russia’s security,” Ambassador Mantytskiy said.
