At least 10 people were killed and 55 were injured when Russian shelling pounded Kherson in southern Ukraine, forcing Moscow’s soldiers to flee the area last month.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, tweeted pictures of the devastation on social media after returning from a brief trip to Washington.
He pointed out that the destruction occurred as Ukrainians were starting their Christmas celebrations, which for many Orthodox Christians will end with the customary celebration on January 7.
Zelenskyy tweeted, “This is not delicate content — it’s the genuine life of Kherson.”
The pictures showed burning cars, dead people lying around, and blown out windows of buildings.
The Kherson region’s governor, Yaroslav Yanushevych, declared on television that the recent shelling of the city had resulted in an increase in fatalities from seven to ten.
55 people were hurt, he continued, with 18 of them in critical condition. A 6-year-old girl was among the numerous people injured by Russian bombardment, according to Yanushevych.
On Saturday, it will have been 10 months since the Russian invasion first began.
Since early October, Ukraine has been subjected to an intense barrage of Russian artillery fire, missiles, shelling, and drone assaults, much of which targets the energy infrastructure in an effort to disrupt electricity and heating supplies as the bitter winter approaches.
Kherson has experienced particularly heavy bombardment ever since Russian soldiers departed and the Ukrainian army took control of the city in November.
The Donetsk regional governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko, reported two fatalities and five injuries from shelling there earlier on Saturday. The fatalities occurred in Kurakhove, a hamlet of 20,000 people located 30 kilometers west of the Donetsk city under Russian control.
According to Valentyn Reznichenko, the regional governor of Dnipropetrovsk, over 60 shells struck three settlements in the vicinity of Nikopol throughout the course of the night.
Zelenskyy has returned to Kyiv after his trip to Washington, where he secured another US$1.8 billion ($2.6 billion) military aid package. Stepne, a settlement on the outskirts of Zaporizhzhia, was also hit by shelling, but there were no details on casualties, according to the governor, Oleksander Starukh.
The battle would come to an end at the negotiation table once the objectives of the “special military operation,” according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Friday.
He referred to “the realities of today that can’t be ignored” in reference to Moscow’s demand that Ukraine recognize Russia’s sovereignty over the Crimean Peninsula, which it annexed in 2014, as well as other territorial gains, and claimed that no reported Ukrainian peace plan can succeed without doing so.
