Several Ukrainian cities were the targets of Russian midnight assaults, according to Ukrainian officials, who also accused Moscow for the deaths of dozens of Ukrainian POWs in a separatist-controlled region of the country’s east.
The International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations have a responsibility to respond, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, after the POWS were killed during shelling of a prison complex in the Donetsk area.
“It was a deliberate Russian war crime, a deliberate mass murder of Ukrainian prisoners of war,” Zelenskyy said in a video address late Friday. “There should be a clear legal recognition of Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism.”
Both parties claimed that the attack on the jail was planned and meant to intimidate the Ukrainian detainees and destroy any proof of potential crimes.
Russia said that the jail in Olenivka, a settlement under the control of the Moscow-backed Donetsk People’s Republic, was attacked by Ukrainian forces using precision rocket launchers provided by the United States.
According to separatist leaders and Russian officials, the attack left 75 people injured, including 53 Ukrainian POWs.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said it has asked for access to the prison “to ascertain the health and condition of all the people present on-site at the time of the attack.” The organization organized civilian evacuations during the war and worked to monitor the treatment of POWS held by Russia and Ukraine.
“Our priority right now is making sure that the wounded receive life-saving treatment and that the bodies of those who lost their lives are dealt with in a dignified manner,” the Red Cross said in a statement.
Russian missiles struck a school building in Kharkiv, the second-largest city in the nation, overnight, and another strike happened about an hour later, according to mayor Ihor Terekhov on Saturday. There were no reports of injuries right away.
According to Mayor Vadim Lyakh, the bus terminal in the city of Sloviansk was also damaged. As Russian and separatist troops attempt to fully annex the Donetsk area, one of the two eastern provinces that Russia has recognized as independent republics, Sloviansk lies close to the front lines of combat.
The region’s government said on Facebook on Saturday that shelling in the important port city of Mykolaiv, southern Ukraine, resulted in one fatality and six injuries after hitting a residential area.
According to reports, Ukrainian soldiers seized in May following the capitulation of Mariupol, another port city where forces infamously held out against a months-long Russian siege, were slain in Friday’s raid on the jail.
Moscow launched an inquiry into the assault and dispatched a team from the largest criminal investigative organization in the nation, the Investigative Committee, to the scene. Fragments of precise High Mobility Artillery Rocket System rockets that were supplied by the United States were discovered at the scene, according to the state news agency RIA Novosti.
The Russian military shelled the jail, according to the Ukrainian military, to hide the suspected torture and killing of Ukrainians there. The Russian military denied any rocket or artillery strikes in Olenivka.
The conflicting accounts and incomplete information hindered determining who was responsible for the strike, according to the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, although the “existing visual evidence appears to corroborate the Ukrainian allegation more than the Russian one.”