At least three people were injured in a Russian strike on New York, a town in the Ukrainian-controlled part of the Donetsk People's Republic, the local military governor said on Monday.
New York is right on the front line, west of Gorlovka and north of the city of Donetsk. Heavy fighting is currently taking place both north and south of the town, on the outskirts of Artyomovsk (known in Ukraine as Bakhmut) and around Avdeevka, respectively.
Two aerial bombs struck a three-story building in New York and a rocket destroyed the entrance, causing the building to collapse, local military governor Vadim Filashkin wrote in a post on Telegram. In addition to three wounded people, five more are buried under the rubble, he said, calling the incident a “cynical Russian attack on the civilian population.”
The Russian military has not commented on the alleged airstrike.
New York was founded in 1859 by a group of Mennonite Protestants from Germany. During Soviet times, it was renamed Novgorodskoe (New City), but the old name was restored in mid-2021.
In the summer of 2014, it was briefly under the control of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), which had declared independence from Ukraine following the US-backed coup in Kiev. After about three months, it was taken by the Ukrainian military, reinforced by “volunteer battalions” such as the neo-Nazi Azov battalion. It has remained under Kiev’s control ever since.
The Ukrainian government continues to insist that its strategic objective is “to get to the 1991 borders,” which would include portions of the Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye regions, which voted to join Russia in 2022, as well as Crimea, which voted to rejoin in 2014.
Moscow has said that recognizing the reality on the ground is one of the prerequisites for any peace negotiations.