News Desk :
At least five people were killed and 18 injured in a missile strike on Ukraine’s southern port city of Odesa on Saturday, the president’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak said in an online post.
Ukraine’s southern air command had earlier said that two missiles struck a military facility and two residential buildings in Odesa.
It comes after the Ukraine military’s General Staff said Russian forces were continuing their “offensive operations” in eastern Ukraine with the goal of establishing full control over the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and securing “a land route between these territories and the occupied Crimea, reports Evening Standard.”
Ukrainian forces in the past 24 hours repelled eight Russian attacks in the two regions, destroying nine tanks, 18 armored units and 13 vehicles, a tanker and three artillery systems, the General Staff said on its Facebook page on Saturday morning.
Russian forces continue to partially block and shell Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, and are active in the area of Izyum, the update said.
It follows reports that Russian forces are attacking a steel plant that is the last Ukrainian stronghold in the city of Mariupol.
“The enemy is trying to strangle the final resistance of the defenders of Mariupol in the Azovstal area,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said on national television.
“They have renewed airstrikes on the plant’s territory, on the area defended by our troops, and are trying to conduct assault operations. Our defenders are holding against a numerically superior enemy, despite an extremely difficult situation, and they even carry out counterattacks,” he said.
President Vladimir Putin had reportedly ordered his defence minister on Thursday to block off the vast Azovstal complex “so not even a fly can get through” rather than try to storm it.
According to Ukrainian officials, some 1,000 civilians, including women and children, remain trapped at Azovstal together with the Ukrainian troops holed up there.
Shocking footage released online shows women and children sheltering underground in the Azovstal plant.
Some of them have been hiding in the plant’s tunnels for as long as two months, according to reports.
