Kherson

Russian shelling of Ukraine killed at least five people overnight and knocked out power in most of the southern city of Kherson.

Officials in southern Ukraine said the Russian military used a record number of aerial bombs over the Kherson region in the past 24 hours.

Six people have been killed in Russian attacks on Ukraine in the past 24 hours, local officials reported Sunday.

Seven people – including a 23-day-old baby girl – were killed in Russian shelling in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region on Sunday.

Ukraine, once the ‘breadbasket’ of Europe, will need at least twenty years for its farming sector to recover after the war with Russia.

Residents of the Kherson region in Ukraine find themselves dealing with new hardships thanks to the breach of the Kakhovka Dam on Tuesday, including flooded homes, drowning, disease, and even landmines dislodged by floodwater from the Dnipro River.

Ukraine says Russia is shelling flooded civilian areas around Kherson even as efforts to evacuate thousands goes on.

The Russian military on Monday claimed it was able to make advances against Ukrainian forces in the Kherson and Kursk regions.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – Russian shells pummeled the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson on Saturday, killing seven people and injuring 58 more in the city that Moscow’s forces were forced to abandon last month.

Top Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhaylo Podolyak called suggestions that his country should engage in peace negotiations with Russia “strange,” dismissing any potential talks on Sunday – a pivot away from the more conciliatory language that his boss, President Volodymyr Zelensky, began adopting this month.

Britain’s Ministry of Defence has credited Russia’s relatively well-executed withdrawal from Kherson to their forces’ more unified leadership under  General Sergei Surovikin, but believes they are still “riven” with poor leadership at lower levels and a “cover-up culture”.

President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the embattled region of Kherson, southern Ukraine, on Monday, declaring that the expulsion of Russian troops there was “the beginning of the end of the war” between the two countries.

The Russian Defense Ministry on Friday announced its withdrawal from the banks of the Dnipro River in Ukraine’s Kherson region was completed, denying reports of a hasty retreat under fire that left equipment and wounded troops behind.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – Russian-installed authorities in Ukraine told all residents of the city of Kherson to leave “immediately” Saturday ahead of an expected advance by Ukrainian troops waging a counter-offensive to recapture one of the first urban areas Russia took after invading the country.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has personally thanked U.S. President Joe Biden for supplying Kyiv with another “security aid package” worth $725 million.

(AFP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow was “doing everything right” in its nearly eight-month invasion of Ukraine despite a string of embarrassing defeats against Kyiv’s forces, who will receive $725 million in new U.S. military assistance.

Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia defended the referendums, claiming that more than 100 international observers from Italy, Germany, Venezuela, and Latvia who observed the voting recognized the outcomes as legitimate.

Russian forces launched new strikes on Ukrainian cities Saturday as Kremlin-orchestrated votes continued in occupied regions of Ukraine to pave the way for their annexation by Moscow.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s home city of Kryvyi Rih has been flooded after Russian strikes against hydraulic structures burst a major dam.

The British Defense Ministry on Monday reported that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has been pushed to the sidelines of the Ukraine conflict by unhappy dictator Vladimir Putin.

Ukrainian officials claim that a long-awaited counter-offensive in the southern Kherson region is underway, and that the Russians’ first line of defence has been breached.

Lt. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said Russian warplanes have struck Ukrainian army positions in the southern Kherson region and in the Donetsk region. He added that the Russian air force also hit a facility in the Kharkiv region, killing at least 100 and wounding 50 “mercenaries” from the West.

(AP) – Russia’s envoy to international organizations based in Vienna, Mikhail Ulyanov, called on Ukraine to stop attacking the plant in order to allow an inspection mission from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – Russia’s military pounded residential areas across Ukraine overnight, claiming gains, as Ukrainian forces pressed a counteroffensive to try to take back an occupied southern region, striking the last working bridge over a river in the Russian-occupied Kherson region, Ukrainian authorities said Saturday.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – Russia’s military fired a missile barrage at an airfield in central Ukraine on Saturday, killing at least three people, while Ukrainian forces launched rocket strikes on river crossings in a Russian-occupied southern region.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – Russian forces are managing to “raise true hell” in Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland despite reports of them taking an operational pause, a regional governor said Saturday, while the government in Kyiv urged people in Russian-occupied southern areas to evacuate “by all possible means” ahead of a Ukrainian offensive.

A counter-offensive has pushed Russians out of parts of the southern Kherson region they took early in the war, according to Zelensky.

Russia’s state-run Tass news service on Wednesday reported that the breakaway areas of Kherson in Ukraine and South Ossetia in Georgia will ask to be incorporated into Russia.

LVIV, Ukraine (AP) – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russian troops in southern Ukraine have been carrying out torture and kidnappings, and he called on the world Sunday to respond.

Figures released Wednesday reveal upwards of one million refugees are fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, alongside an estimated 2000 civilian fatalities.