Ukrainian forces are facing “massive” and relentless artillery attacks in a battleground eastern city, Kyiv said on Tuesday.
Moscow’s troops have been pummeling eastern Ukraine for weeks and are slowly advancing, despite fierce resistance from the outgunned Ukrainian military.
With Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces tightening their grip on Severodonetsk in the Donbas region, its twin city of Lysychansk is now coming under heavier bombardment.
Photo: AFP
“The Russian army is massively shelling Lysychansk,” Sergiy Gaiday, governor of the Lugansk region, which includes both cities, wrote on Telegram. “They are just destroying everything there... They destroyed buildings and unfortunately there are casualties.”
Russian forces have been occupying villages in the area and taking control of the two cities would give Moscow control of the whole of Lugansk, allowing them to press further into the Donbas.
In Lysychansk, a Russian strike had left a gaping hole in a police station and damaged nearby apartment blocks, journalists in the city reported.
The direct hit on the station on Monday wounded 20 police officers, authorities said.
“Partition walls fell down and the doors were blown out,” said a policeman who gave his nickname as Petrovich, showing the damage to the building.
In his daily address on Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy accused the Russian army of “brutal and cynical” shelling in the eastern Kharkiv region.
“The Russian army is deaf to any rationality. It simply destroys, simply kills,” Zelenskiy said.
Fifteen people were killed by Russian shelling in Kharkiv on Tuesday, its governor said.
Away from the battlefield, Moscow was locked in an increasingly bitter dispute with EU member Lithuania over the country’s restrictions on rail traffic to the Russian outpost of Kaliningrad.
The territory is about 1,600km from Moscow, bordering Lithuania and Poland.
By blocking goods arriving from Russia, Lithuania says it is simply adhering to EU-wide sanctions on Moscow.
However, Moscow accused Brussels of an “escalation” and summoned the EU’s ambassador to Russia.
The US made clear its commitment to Lithuania as an ally in NATO, which considers an attack against one member an attack on all.
“We stand by our NATO allies and we stand by Lithuania,” US Department of State spokesman Ned Price told reporters in Washington.
The National Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology yesterday showcased its locally developed variants of the Vision 60 robotic patrol dog, which it plans to deploy on the nation’s outlying territories in the South China Sea. The variants were produced under the Joint Lab project — created by the institute and domestic companies — and assembled with domestically produced motors, lenses and artificial intelligence (AI) systems alongside licensed tech from the US, Missile and Rocket Systems Research Division deputy director Jen Kuo-kang (任國光) told the media event at a military base in Taipei’s Dazhi (大直) area. Taiwan has built up its strengths
RIGHT DIRECTION: Taiwan’s efforts to prevent forced labor include a proposal to ‘fully prohibit’ employers from withholding workers’ documents, an official said Taiwan is to establish a mechanism to restrict imports of goods linked to forced labor, the Executive Yuan said yesterday, after the US proposed imposing additional tariffs on Taiwanese goods over labor concerns. “The Ministry of Labor and the Ministry of Economic Affairs are to establish an interministerial review procedure,” Executive Yuan spokesperson Michelle Lee (李慧芝) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “The government is to use the Foreign Trade Act [貿易法] as the legal basis to restrict imports of goods produced with forced labor” and bring its supply chain governance more in line with international standards on human rights, resilience
NOT IMMEDIATE: Taiwan has a chance to appeal the proposed 10 percent tariff before it starts, while other countries face a 12.5 percent tariff from the trade office Taiwan is among 60 economies determined by the US to have failed to impose or enforce a ban on the importation of goods produced with forced labor, according to a notice released on Tuesday by the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR), which proposed imposing an additional 10 percent or more tariff on them. The USTR in a statement said that following an investigation, it had determined under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 that the failure of the 60 economies to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor is
TIT-FOR-TAT: The US allegedly revoked the visa of a Chinese national working at Xinhua News Agency in the US in response to Beijing’s expulsion of Vivian Wang The Presidential Office yesterday condemned China for expelling a New York Times correspondent from Beijing following the newspaper’s interview with President William Lai (賴清德), saying the move highlighted Beijing’s suppression of press freedom and its threat to international news media. Taiwan has noted a series of recent incidents in which Beijing used similar tactics to “threaten and pressure international media outlets and journalists,” Presidential Office spokeswoman Karen Kuo (郭雅慧) said in a statement. “This concerns not only press freedom and freedom of expression, but also the safety of journalists, and Taiwan and relevant partners are paying close attention to the situation,” she
RSS