Russia aimed several waves of Shahed drones and six Kalibr cruise missiles at the Black Sea port city of Odesa overnight, Ukraine’s Operational Command “South” has said, with all shot down by air defences.
However debris from the rockets and drones injured an elderly man and damaged “port infrastructure facilities” and several private homes, it said in a Facebook post.
In Mykolaiv, four Shahed drones were shot down but an industrial facility caught fire, it said. There were no casualties.
The attack on the southern port cities came hours after Moscow said it was withdrawing from a UN-brokered deal that allowed Ukraine to safely export its grain via its Black Sea ports.
The wires have sent through a series of images by photographer Genya Savilov from Lyman in Donetsk. The town, a key railway hub, was occupied by Russia last year before being recaptured by Ukrainian forces in October.
Once a town of 27,000, the remaining residents are fearful about Russian attempts to retake it. Ukrainian officials said on Monday that large groups of Russian personnel are trying to break through Ukrainian defence lines in the area.
Monday’s attack on the Kerch Bridge and Moscow’s continued promotion of Crimea as a tourist destination will have “significant impacts” on Russian logistics in southern Ukraine amid the Ukrainian counteroffensive, the Institute for the Study of War has said in its latest assessment of the conflict.
The bridge is along one of only two ground links to Russia’s southern force grouping but Moscow has urged Russian civilians “to drive through and to a warzone rather than advising them to avoid it as a responsible government would”, the US-based thinktank said.
“Russian occupation authorities recently struggled to mitigate traffic issues just from increased Russian tourism across the Kerch Strait Bridge,” it wrote.
It also noted that shortages of supplies was one of the complaints brought up by Maj Gen Ivan Popov, who commanded the 58th Combined Arms army and who said he was recently fired for complaining about the dire situation of Russian forces on the frontlines.
Many of Popov’s complaints indicated that the 58th Combined Arms Army, and likely other Russian formations deployed in Zaporizhia Oblast, suffer from supply shortages that will further worsen if tourist and other civilian traffic slow down logistics routes supporting Russian forces in southern Ukraine.
Russian air defences and electronic countermeasure systems downed 28 Ukrainian drones over Crimea in the early hours of Tuesday, the RIA news agency has cited the Russian defence ministry as saying.
The drone attacks caused no casualties or damages, the ministry said according to Reuters.
The raid followed an attack by Ukrainian sea drones on the Crimea Bridge on Monday which damaged it and disrupted car traffic.
Partial road traffic opened on one lane of the Crimean Bridge late on Monday, Russian deputy prime minister Marat Khusnullin said on his Telegram channel, almost 24 hours after it was struck by two explosions.
“Motor transport on the Crimean Bridge has been restored in reverse mode on the most outer right lane,” Khusnullin wrote on Monday according to Reuters.
However, ferry operations were suspended early on Tuesday, due to bad weather, Russian agencies reported, citing the Moscow-backed emergency situations ministry of Crimea.
Early on Monday two explosions damaged the bridge, also known as the Kerch Bridge or Kerch Strait Bridge, connecting Crimea to mainland Russia, killing two people and closing the main conduit for Russian road traffic to the occupied peninsula.
Moscow called it a “terrorist” strike by Ukrainian sea drones though Kyiv has not claimed responsibility for the attack.
Russia has launched a series of air strikes across Ukraine, including on the southern port cities of Odesa and Mykolaiv, hours after it said it was pulling out of a UN-brokered grain deal which allowed Ukrainian produce to be exported via the Black Sea.
A “quite serious” fire broke out at one of the “facilities” in Mykolaiv, mayor Oleksandr Senkevich said on Telegram, adding that he would provide further details in the morning.
Air defences were also activated in Odesa, where Oleh Kiper, head of the region’s military administration, said air defence systems repelled several waves of Russian drone attacks.
The Ukrainian air force also warned of drone attacks in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Dnipropetrovsk regions and of the threat of ballistic missile attacks in Poltava, Cherkasy, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv and Kirovohrad.
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine, with me Helen Livingstone.
Russia launched a series of drone strikes across Ukraine overnight to Tuesday, causing a “quite serious” fire at one of the “facilities” in the southern port of Mykolaiv, according to the mayor, Oleksandr Senkevich.
Air defences were also activated in the nearby Black Sea city of Odesa and air raid alerts sounded across Ukraine including in Kherson, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv and Cherkasy. The raids come hours after Moscow said it had pulled out of a deal allowing Ukrainian grain to be shipped from Black Sea ports.
Meanwhile Russian authorities said road traffic had been partially restored on the Crimea bridge, the only direct link between the occupied peninsula and mainland Russia and which was damaged by an explosion 24 hours earlier.
“Motor transport on the Crimean Bridge has been restored in reverse mode on the most outer right lane,” Russian deputy prime minister Marat Khusnullin said on his Telegram channel.
In other developments:
Russia pulled out of the Black Sea grain deal, brokered by the UN and Turkey a year ago to alleviate a global food crisis by allowing Ukrainian grain to be exported safely. Moscow said the decision was final and warned it could not guarantee the safety of ships.
Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, said Russia’s decision was “unconscionable” while UN secretary general Ant?nio Guterres said he did not accept its explanations for why it had terminated the agreement, including the loss of Russian food markets.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the grain deal must continue and could operate without Russian participation. “Africa has the right to stability. Asia has the right to stability,” he said in his nightly video address.
A deadly attack on the Kerch Bridge closed the only land link between the occupied Crimean peninsula and the Russian mainland. A span carrying road traffic in one direction was completely destroyed though the parallel rail bridge was not affected.
Vladimir Putin said the defence ministry in Moscow was preparing a response to the attack, in which a Russian couple was killed and their daughter injured. The Russian president called it a “terrorist attack” by Ukraine and claimed the bridge had “not been used for military transportation for a long time”.
Kyiv did not officially claim responsibility for the attack, but Ukrainian media said Ukrainian security services had deployed maritime drones against the bridge. In what also appeared to be a tacit acknowledgment, Ukrainian security service spokesperson Artem Degtyarenko said in a statement that his agency would reveal details of how the “bang” was organised after Kyiv had won the war.
The mayor of Kharkiv said the bridge was a legitimate military target and that the attack would cause “a lot of logistical problems for Russia”. In an interview with the Guardian, Ihor Terekhov dismissed Russia’s claim that it was an act of Ukrainian terrorism, saying that the Kremlin had brought death and destruction to his city on an epic scale.
Britain introduced new sanctions, including against Russian education minister Sergey Kravtsov, related to what it described as Moscow’s forced deportation of Ukrainian children.
French dairy group Danone is reviewing its legal options after the Russian state took control of its subsidiary in the country, a source close to the matter told Reuters. According to a decree signed by Putin on Sunday, foreign-owned stakes in Danone Russia, along with beer company Carlsberg’s stake in a local brewer have been put under the “temporary management” of government property agency Rosimushchestvo.
More mercenaries from Russia’s Wagner military contractor arrived in Belarus on Monday, a monitoring group said, continuing their relocation to the ex-Soviet nation after last month’s short-lived mutiny. Belaruski Hajun, a Belarusian activist group, said a convoy of more than 100 vehicles carrying Russian flags and Wagner insignia entered the country, heading toward a field camp that Belarusian authorities have offered to the company.
US president Joe Biden will meet with Pope Francis’ peace envoy on Tuesday as part of the Holy See’s peace and humanitarian initiatives for Ukraine. Cardinal Matteo Zuppi’s two-day visit to Washington follows his recent mission to Moscow and an earlier stop in Kyiv, where he met with Zelenskiy.
