Russia suffers heavy blow as Ukraine uses US-supplied high mobility rockets to destroy key weapon depot
The Ukrainian military’s southern command said this morning that a rocket strike targeted a depot in Russian-held Nova Kakhovka, about 35 miles east of the important Black Sea port city of Kherson, which is also occupied by Russian forces.
The Russian ammunition depot was apparently targeted by Ukrainian forces overnight, resulting in a massive blast captured on social media.
The nature of the strike suggested that Ukrainian forces used US-supplied multiple-launch High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (Himars) to strike the area.
Russia’s Tass news agency offered a different account, saying the target was a mineral fertiliser storage facility that exploded, and that a market, hospital and houses were damaged.
Some of the ingredients in fertiliser can be used for ammunition.
Ukrainian authorities also said Russian fire struck the southern city of Mykolaiv on Tuesday morning, hitting two medical facilities and residential buildings.
Four people were wounded in the shelling attack, Mykolaiv regional governor Vitaliy Kim said on Telegram.
Air raid sirens sounded early on Tuesday morning in the western city of Lviv and other areas of Ukraine as Russian forces continued to make advances.
According to a Tuesday intelligence briefing from the British military, Russia is continuing to make “small, incremental gains” in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, where heavy fighting led the province’s governor last week to urge its 350,000 remaining residents to move to safer places in western Ukraine.
Yet many in the Donbas, a fertile industrial region in eastern Ukraine made of the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, refuse — or are unable — to flee, despite scores of civilians being killed and wounded each week.
The death toll in a Russian rocket attack that struck an apartment building in eastern Ukraine on Saturday has risen to 34.
The head of the Donetsk regional military administration, Pavlo Kyrylenko, made the announcement on social media, saying nine wounded people had been recovered from the building in Chasiv Yar.
The British intelligence briefing said Russia had seized the Ukrainian town of Hryhorivka and continued to push toward the Donetsk province cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.
“Russian forces are likely maintaining military pressure on Ukrainian forces whilst regrouping and reconstituting for further offensives in the near future,” the briefing said.
However, Russia may be relying more heavily on private forces, like the Wagner mercenary group, to avoid a general mobilisation, the British said.