Rescuers yesterday searched for survivors in the rubble of an apartment building in eastern Ukraine after a Russian strike destroyed the complex, as Kyiv said it expected a major offensive on the first anniversary of Moscow’s invasion.
At least three people were killed on Wednesday and 20 wounded when a Russian rocket struck a residential building in the centre of Kramatorsk, in Ukraine’s eastern industrial region of Donetsk. Rescuers wearing flashlights on their heads pulled survivors from the debris, their faces covered in dust as they tried to find signs of life under the cover of night.
After discovering the body of a resident who was crushed under the rubble, rescuers carried the victim away on a stretcher, as firefighters worked their way through the mangled building structure. Donetsk regional police said paramedics, search-and-rescue dogs and explosive experts were combing the area as they believed that more people could be trapped.
Photo: AFP
“I first heard a whistle and then everything started to fly around,” said Petro, 71, whose apartment was damaged.
“Peaceful people died and are under the rubble,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy wrote on social media after the rocket strike. “This is the daily reality of life in our country.”
The strike in Donetsk — where Moscow has claimed to have captured fresh ground — came as the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approached.
“Given that [the Russians] live through symbols, we think that they will try something around Feb. 24,” Ukrainian Minister of Defense Oleksiy Reznikov said in an interview on French television, broadcast late on Wednesday.
“We do not underestimate our enemy,” he said. “Their mobilization has not stopped.”
Reznikov said Kyiv believes Moscow has deployed about 500,000 troops, far more than Russia’s claim of 300,000 personnel currently mobilized.
Separately, Ukraine on Wednesday expanded a clampdown on corruption, launching coordinated searches of residences linked to divisive oligarch Igor Kolomoisky and former Ukrainian minister of the interior Arsen Avakov, as well as tax offices in the capital, said David Arakhamia, an official with Zelenskiy’s party.
The searches came ahead of a key summit with the EU and appeared to be part of a push by Kyiv to reassure military and financial donors in European capitals and Washington that Ukraine is tackling systemic graft.
“We are carrying out the task set by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and simultaneously delivering a global blow to the internal enemy,” Security Service of Ukraine head Vasyl Maliuk said.
“Every criminal who has the audacity to harm Ukraine, especially in the conditions of war, must clearly understand that we will put handcuffs on him,” he said.
Officers also raided tax offices in the capital and senior customs officials were fired, Arakhamia said.
Ukraine has suffered from corruption for years, but efforts to stamp it out have been overshadowed by Moscow’s invasion last February.
In the biggest political shakeup since the invasion, authorities last week fired about a dozen senior figures, including defense officials and a top aide to the president’s office.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the