A Russian air attack on Ukraine’s Odesa city early on Sunday killed one, injured nearly 20 and badly damaged a Russian-linked Orthodox cathedral.
“Odesa: another night attack of the monsters,” Oleh Kiper, governor of southern Ukraine’s Odesa region, said on the Telegram messaging app.
One person was killed and 19 injured, including four children, in the missile attacks that also destroyed six houses and apartment buildings. Fourteen people were hospitalised, he said.
Officials said they retrieved the icon of the patroness of the port city from under the rubble of the cathedral.
Russia has been pounding Odesa and other Ukrainian food export facilities nearly daily over the past week after Moscow withdrew from a UN-brokered sea corridor agreement that allowed for the safe shipment of Ukrainian grain.
Odesa’s military administration said that the Spaso-Preobrazhenskyi Cathedral of the Moscow-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), was severely damaged. “The Kasperovska icon of the Mother of God, who is the patroness of Odesa, was retrieved from under the rubble,” the administration said on its Telegram channel.
The Spaso-Preobrazhenskyi Cathedral, or the Transfiguration Cathedral, is Odesa's largest Orthodox church building. It was consecrated in 1809.
Photographs and videos published by Odesa officials and the police showed parts of the building destroyed and rubble inside with several icons lined up on the ground.
The UOC is Ukraine's second-largest church, though most Ukrainian Orthodox believers belong to a separate branch of the faith formed four years ago by uniting branches independent of Russian authority.
Ukraine has accused the UOC of maintaining links to the pro-invasion Russian Orthodox Church, which used to be its parent church but with which the UOC says it broke ties in May last year.
Ukraine's air force said on its Telegram messaging app early on Sunday that Russia launched high-precision Onyx missiles and sea-to-shore Kalibr cruise missiles on Odesa.
The city's military administration said that air defence systems destroyed a “significant part” of the missiles, which they said included Iskander ballistic missiles.
Russia had described the attacks as revenge for a Ukrainian strike on a Russian-built bridge to Crimea – the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula that Russia seized in 2014. It has accused Ukraine of using the sea corridor to launch “terrorist attacks”.
Elsewhere, Russian president Vladimir Putin said Ukraine’s counteroffensive “has failed” as he hosted Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, his close ally, for talks in St Petersburg on Sunday.
“There is no counteroffensive,” Russian news agencies quoted Mr Lukashenko as saying. Mr Putin replied: “It exists, but it has failed.”
Ukraine began its long-anticipated counter-offensive last month but has so far made only small gains against well entrenched Russian forces who control more than a sixth of its territory after nearly 17 months of war.
US Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday the Ukrainian drive was “far from a failure” but would be long, hard and bloody.
A Telegram channel linked to Mr Lukashenko quoted him as saying in a jocular tone that fighters of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group who are now training Belarus’s army were keen to push across the border into Nato member Poland.
“The Wagner guys have started to stress us - they want to go west. ‘Let’s go on a trip to Warsaw and Rzeszow’,” he was quoted as saying. There was no indication that Mr Lukashenko was seriously entertaining that idea. – Reuters