Russia-Ukraine war live updates: Missile strike is ‘absolute evil,’ Zelensky says; Russia to cut off Finland from natural gas
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the Donbas region is “completely destroyed” and described unrelenting Russian assaults on the easternmost city still under Ukrainian control, Severodonetsk.
“There’s hell, and that’s not an exaggeration,” Zelensky said in a video address near midnight Thursday, about the ruin in Donbas, adding that “brutal and absolutely pointless bombing” is crippling Severodonetsk and other cities in the east.
Zelensky and local officials, in separate posts Friday, said at least 12 people were dead and dozens wounded in Severodonetsk, a city in the Luhansk region where about 100,000 people lived before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February.
Severodonetsk has become a major Russian focal point in the past day, and some observers fear a siege similar to the gutting of Mariupol. Officials, posting on Telegram, have said Russia has destroyed several residential buildings there. Previously, two people were reported killed and nine injured in an attack on a hospital.
Luhansk’s regional governor, Serhiy Haidai, wrote on Friday that “the Russians are shelling Severodonetsk very strongly.”
“Up to 15,000 people remain in bomb shelters,” Haidai and Alexander Stryuk, head of the city’s military-civil administration, said in a Telegram post. “Wells in the old districts of the city were brought back into use to provide people with water. All the mobile communication towers have had their power lost. Seventy percent of high-rise buildings are destroyed or damaged; many of them will have to be demolished and new ones built.”
The Washington Post has not been able to independently verify the attacks.
“This is what will be qualified as the genocide of the Ukrainian people and for which the occupiers will definitely be brought to justice,” Zelensky said.