At least 18 people including two children have been killed and dozens more wounded in the latest Russian missile strike on a civilian building in Ukraine. The Russian response? Of course, as usual: “We dindu nuffin! We iz innocent and shiet, the Ukrainians are bombing themselves.” The Russians are like the black thugs of white people. They never did anything wrong and all of this while Putin masquerades around as a Christian for idiots to believe him. Yeah very Christian thing you’re doing in Ukraine, Putin! It is very Christian of you to kill all these fellow Christians. How is he even sleeping well at night? Doesn’t he have nightmares?
Kyiv says a AS-4 anti-ship missile – the same kind used against a shopping mall in Kremenchuk earlier this week – hit a nine-storey apartment block in Odesa overnight, all-but destroying the building.
Thirty one people were hurt in the strike, local officials said, including a pregnant woman and four infants. Video shows rescuers searching the rubble for survivors, and a distressed woman calling for help as a child cries in the background.
It is just the latest Russian airstrike to hit a civilian target in Ukraine, after the Kremenchuk shopping centre was struck on Monday – killing at least 20 – and an apartment block in Mykolaiv was hit Wednesday – killing at least eight.
Ukraine says Russia is deliberately targeting civilians as part of a ‘terror’ campaign to distract from its failing invasion, a charge Putin denies.
The Odesa attack – thought to have been carried out by a Russian Tu-22 bomber – came just hours after Putin’s forces withdrew from Snake Island, around 90 miles out to sea from the key port city.
Russian forces were forced to withdraw from the 100-acre spit of land after sustaining heavy fire from Ukrainian artillery and anti-ship missile batteries.
Moscow attempted to play off the withdrawal as a ‘goodwill gesture’, the same phrasing it used when forced to retreat from Kyiv and Chernihiv earlier in the war.
Snake Island has little practical value but is of strategic importance, helping the occupier control waters off Odesa – which remains a key target of Russia’s invasion.
Russia had repeatedly tried to position anti-aircraft and anti-missile batteries on the island, but saw them repeatedly destroyed.
Ukraine had also successfully targeted helicopters and boats trying to reinforce and resupply units stationed on the island.
Losing the territory makes the possibility of an amphibious assault on Odesa – feared since the early days of the war – increasingly remote.
It is also hugely embarrassing for Putin’s already-shamed Black Sea fleet which has seen a number of its ships – including the flagship Moskva – sunk by a country which has no functioning navy.
The decision to abandon Snake Island ‘changes the situation in the Black Sea considerably,’ Zelensky said in his daily address Thursday.
‘It does not yet guarantee security. It does not yet guarantee that the enemy will not return. But it already considerably limits the actions of the occupiers.’
On Wednesday, another Russian missile hit a five-storey apartment block in the city of Mykolaiv, which is located around 70 miles down the coast from Odesa.
On Friday, Ukraine announced that the death toll from that attack had risen to eight after the body of a man was found in a collapsed stairwell.
And earlier in the week, a Russian missile hit the Amstor shopping mall in the city of Kremenchuk – central Ukraine – killing at least 20.
Another 21 people are missing, presumed dead, after the missile hit around 4pm local time on Monday.
Russia claims it carried out two strikes on military targets in the city – a weapons store in a nearby factory and a train station being used to transport arms – and the dis-used mall accidentally burned down after fire spread.
But Ukraine has released a number of CCTV clips that challenge those claims, including footage which shows an anti-ship missile slamming directly into the mall.
More video released yesterday shows people shopping and working inside the mall at the time it was struck.
And a third selection of tapes shows a second missile striking the northern end of a factory, raining debris down on civilians in a nearby park.
President Putin has denied his army are deliberately targeting civilians, which would be a war crime.
‘Our army does not attack any civilian infrastructure site. We have every capability of knowing what is situated where,’ Putin told a news conference in the Turkmenistan capital of Ashgabat.
‘Nobody among us shoots just like that, randomly. It is normally done based on intelligence data on targets’ and with ‘high-precision weapons’.
‘I am convinced that this time, everything was done in this exact manner,’ Putin said.
The Russian autocrat was there for the VI Caspian Summit of leaders from Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to discuss ‘topical issues of cooperation in the Caspian Sea’.
As many as 1,000 people were feared to have been inside when it was hit.
It comes after Russian troops hastily abandoned Snake Island yesterday in a fresh blow to Putin’s invasion just days after Ukraine’s armed forces launched a crippling rocket attack on the outpost.
Snake Island became a symbol of Ukrainian resistance in the first days of the war, when the rocky outcrop’s defenders told a Russian warship that called on them to surrender to ‘go f*ck yourself,’ an incident that spurred a defiant meme.
It was also a strategic target, sitting aside shipping lanes near Ukraine’s port of Odessa. Russia had attempted to install missile and air defence batteries while under fire from drones.
Now, however, Ukraine has begun to receive longer range missiles and military gear from its Western backers, and the Russian position on Snake Island seems to have become untenable, officials said.
The Russian defence ministry statement described the retreat as ‘a gesture of goodwill’ meant to demonstrate that Moscow will not interfere with UN efforts to organise protected grain exports from Ukraine but Kyiv claimed it as a win.
‘I thank the defenders of Odessa region who took maximum measures to liberate a strategically important part of our territory,’ Valeriy Zaluzhny, the Ukraine military’s commander-in-chief, said on Telegram.
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