Black Sea tensions grow as Russia’s navy fires warning shots at cargo ship

Russia’s military killed seven people, including two children and their parents, in shelling of southeastern Ukraine on Sunday, and one of its warships fired warning shots to force a cargo ship to stop for inspection as it crossed the Black Sea towards a Ukrainian port.

Moscow said its air defences shot down three Ukrainian missiles aimed at the main bridge linking occupied Crimea with Russia on Saturday, and blew up or jammed 20 drones aimed at other targets on the Black Sea peninsula that the Kremlin seized in 2014. Moscow’s military said it downed another four Ukrainian drones over western Russia on Sunday.

A couple were killed along with their 12-year-old son, 23-day-old daughter and another man in shelling of the village of Shyroka Balka in Ukraine’s southeastern Kherson province, and two people were killed and one injured in the nearby village of Stanislav, Ukrainian interior minister Ihor Klymenko said on Sunday.

“Terrorists will never stop killing civilians voluntarily. Terrorists must be stopped. By force. They do not understand anything else,” he wrote on social media.

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Western parts of the Kherson region have endured frequent Russian shelling since they were liberated last November, and the neighbouring Zaporizhzhia region is now under intense artillery and missile attack as Moscow’s forces try to crush Ukraine’s counteroffensive.

Kyiv’s forces have made only limited progress into heavily mined occupied territory in recent months but gained a foothold over the weekend in the southeastern village of Urozhaine, about 100km north of the Russian-held ports of Berdyansk and Mariupol. Seizing either port would cut Russia’s land link between its western border and Crimea.

“A difficult and worrying situation has now developed in the area of the settlement Urozhaine . . . After two weeks of the most difficult and bloody battles for this settlement, the enemy managed to enter and gain a foothold in the northern part of Urozhaine,” said Vladimir Rogov, a Moscow-appointed official for occupied parts of Zaporizhzhia region.

“Russian soldiers continue to hold positions in the southern part of this settlement. Heavy battles of ultra-high intensity are continuing,” he added.

[ Podcast: How the world sees the war in Ukraine ]

Ukraine’s military said recent operations in the southeast had resulted in “liberated territories” but did not give details. It claims also to be making some progress near the occupied city of Bakhmut in the eastern Donetsk region, but refuses to comment on reports that it has established a bridgehead on the Russian-held eastern bank of the Dnipro river in Kherson region, which would be a potential third “prong” in the counteroffensive.

Russia’s defence ministry said one of its ships in the Black Sea fired warning shots early on Sunday to force a cargo vessel to stop for an inspection, in the first such incident since Moscow’s navy reimposed a blockade on Ukrainian ports last month.

Russian servicemen then landed on the Palau-flagged Sukru Okan from a military helicopter, checked its contents and allowed it to continue towards the port of Ismail, close to Ukraine’s border with Romania.

Ukraine is urging the international community to press Moscow to re-enter a deal to allow it to ship grain from its Black Sea ports. Russia says western states must ease restrictions on its farm exports before the agreement can be revived.