Three people were killed and four others wounded in the latest Ukrainian bombardment of Donetsk and Gorlovka, the head of Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), Denis Pushilin, has said.
Kiev’s forces began “large-scale strikes” on the region at 4am local time, Pushilin wrote on Telegram.
The timing was not without significance. On Saturday, Russia marks the Day of Remembrance and Sorrow, commemorating the estimated 27 million victims of the Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union during World War Two. Adolf Hitler’s forces attacked the USSR at 4am on June 22, 1941.
It was Ukraine’s first deployment of US-made M26 rockets with cluster warheads against Donetsk, the regional head claimed. He reminded that those munitions are fired from HIMARS multiple rocket launchers, provided to Kiev by Washington, with each carrying 644 M-77 submunitions. The attack against Budennovsky district in the southeast of the city killed three men who were working for a local construction firm, Pushilin said.
In the northwest of Donetsk, an elderly man suffered moderate injuries after tripping on an anti-personnel ‘Lepestok’ (Petal) land mine, he said.
Six residential buildings and four civilian infrastructure facilities were also damaged in the strikes on the DPR’s capital, the regional head added.
A Ukrainian drone also struck a moving passenger bus outside the town of Gorlovka northeast of Donetsk. Three people were wounded in the attack, including one who suffered serious injuries, Pushilin wrote.
According to Pushilin, as of midday on Saturday, Kiev’s troops had shelled the republic’s territory 16 times, firing 40 munitions of various types such as HIMARS rockets, 155mm artillery shells and kamikaze drones.
The frequency of Ukrainian strikes on Donetsk, which has been targeted on a regular basis throughout the conflict, has decreased since Russian forces captured the strategic settlement of Avdeevka in February and made other territorial gains in the DPR. However, Ukrainian attacks on the city of some 900,000 people still happen with the use of more sophisticated, longer-range weapons.