Fresh blow to war in Ukraine, 11 killed by shooters at Russian military base
Shooters shot and killed 11 people at Russia’s military training ground on Saturday; the defence ministry said, the latest blow to President Vladimir Putin’s military since the invasion of Ukraine.
The RIA news agency, citing the ministry, said 15 other people were injured in a shooting in the southwestern Belgorod region on Saturday, which borders Ukraine when two men shot a group of people who killed themselves. Voluntarily participated in the war.
It said two attackers – citizens of an unspecified former Soviet republic – had been shot.
The attack came a week after damaged a bridge in Crimea, a peninsula annexed by Russia from Ukraine in 2014. Earlier in the war, the Russian flagship flew and sank in the Black Sea.
Just a day earlier, Putin said Russia should end calling for reservists in two weeks, promising to end a divisive mobilization that called for hundreds of thousands of men to fight in Ukraine and large numbers from the country.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s adviser Oleksey Erestovich said in a YouTube interview that the attackers were from the Central Asian nation of Tajikistan and fired at others after a religious debate.
Reuters could not immediately confirm the comments of Erestovich, a prominent commentator on the war, or independently verify casualty numbers and other details of the incident.
The independent Russian news website SOTA Vision said the attack occurred in the small town of Sooty, close to the Ukrainian border and about 105 km (65 mi) southeast of Belgorod.
Zelensky said on Saturday that Ukrainian troops held the strategic eastern city of Bakhmut despite repeated Russian attacks, while the situation in the larger Donbass region remained complicated.
Although Ukrainian troops have seized thousands of square kilometres (miles) of land in recent attacks to the east and south, officials say progress is likely to be slow after Kyiv’s military faces more stubborn resistance.
Zelenskiy said some 65,000 Russians had been killed since the February 24 attack, far higher than Moscow’s estimated 5,937 dead on September 21.
Russian missile and drone attacks
Putin ordered the mobilization three weeks ago as part of a response to the Russian battlefield defeat in Ukraine. It also announced the destruction of four partially occupied Ukrainian provinces and threatened to use nuclear weapons.
Zelensky also said in an evening address that Russian missiles and drones continued to hit Ukraine’s cities, causing destruction and casualties.
Kyiv said on Friday it expects the US and Germany to deliver state-of-the-art anti-aircraft systems to help defend against missiles this month.
Fighting is particularly intense in the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk provinces bordering Russia. Together they form the large industrial Donbass, which Moscow has not yet fully captured.
The Russian army has repeatedly tried to seize Bakhmut, located on the main road leading to the cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. Both are located in the Donetsk region.
Separately, the Ukrainian Armed Forces general staff said in a Facebook post that troops had repelled 11 separate Russian attacks on Saturday near the cities of Kramatorsk, Bakhmut and Avdievka, north of Donetsk.
