Several dead in Russian shelling

Ukraine’s east, south suffer most in artillery attack

KYI V, UKRAINE Anew barrage of Russian shelling killed at least 10 Ukrainian civilians and wounded 20 others in a day, the office of Ukraine’s president said Friday as the country worked to recover from an earlier wave of Russian missile strikes and drone attacks.

Regional officials said towns and villages in the east and in the south that are within reach of the Russian artillery suffered most. Six people died in the Donetsk region, two in Kherson, and two in the Kharkiv region. A day earlier, missiles and self-propelled drones that Russian forces fired had hit deeper into Ukrainian territory, killing at least 11 people.

The bombardments followed announcements by the United States and Germany of plans to ship powerful tanks to help Ukraine defend itself. Other western countries said they also would share modern tanks from their stockpiles.

Moscow has bristled at the move, and accused western nations of entering a new level of confrontation with Russia.

Donetsk Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said the Russian military used fiercely burning phosphorus munitions in its shelling of the village of Zvanivka, about 20 kilometres north of Bakhmut, a city that has become the focus of a gruelling standoff in recent months. The shelling also damaged apartment buildings and two schools in the nearby town of Vuhledar, Kyrylenko said.

The governor of the neighbouring Luhansk region, Serhii Haidai, said Ukrainian shelling hit two Russian bases in the occupied towns of Kreminna and Rubizhne, killing and wounding “dozens” of Russian soldiers. His claim couldn’t be independently verified.

Further south, Russian troops resumed shelling the town of Nikopol, across the river Dnieper from the Russia-held Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, damaging apartment buildings, gas pipelines, power lines and a bakery, officials said.

Separately on Friday, Russian authorities took new steps in their months-long and widely criticized effort to graft four Ukrainian provinces onto Russia’s already vast territory. They said the illegally annexed provinces would change from the time zone that covers Kyiv to the one in Moscow.

The switch in the Ukrainian southern and eastern regions that Russia declared as part of its territory four months ago — Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson — will take place “in the near future,” Russia’s Ministry of Industry and Trade said. The move comes as part of what the ministry called the “gradual synchronization” of Russian legislation after the “admission of the four subjects.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s highly orchestrated announcement of the illegal annexations came despite widespread international condemnation and the fact that Russia didn’t fully control the areas it annexed. Russia claims to control nearly all of Luhansk and about half of Donetsk.

Meanwhile, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told CTV that his country was ready to send 60 modern tanks — half of them the PT-91model, which was built in Poland from1994 to 2001as a modernized version of the Soviet-era T-72M1.

He said those deliveries would come on top of Poland’s plans to send 14 of its Leopard 2s, after Berlin approved other allies sending the German-made tanks to Ukraine.