Volodymyr Zelensky has vowed revenge on Russia after Putin’s forces rained missiles down on a train station, killing 25 people including an 11-year-old boy, in a savage Independence Day attack The boy was killed when a missile struck his house in Chaplyne and 24 people died later when rockets hit the rural town’s railway station and set fire to five train carriages yesterday.
According to the Daily Mail, The small town of 3,500 people lies in the Dnipropetrovsk region – the scene of intense recent fighting between Ukrainian and Kremlin forces. Zelensky said in a late-night address: ‘Chaplyne is our pain today. As of this moment, there are 25 dead, five of them burned in the car, an 11-year-old boy died, and a Russian missile destroyed his house.
‘Search and rescue operations at the railway station will continue. We will definitely make the occupiers bear responsibility for everything they have done. And we will certainly drive the invaders out of our land.’
The wartime President had previously warned that the ‘erratic’ Russian dictator would use the killing of the daughter of his ultra-nationalist aide Alexander Dugin – dubbed ‘Putin’s Rasputin’ – in a car bombing in Moscow last week as a pretext to ratchet up his war on the embattled European country. Ukraine’s Independence Day yesterday, marking 31 years since its rupture from the Soviet Union, was also predicted to see a surge in attacks.
While most fighting is now taking place in the east and south, where the fighting has stalled, Russia regularly strikes Ukrainian cities with long-range missiles, according to Kyiv.
In the Dnipropetrovsk region on the southern front earlier yesterday, the Russians again shelled the cities of Nikopol and Marhanets, damaging several buildings and wounding two people, authorities said. Russian troops also shelled the city of Zaporizhzhia, but no casualties were reported.
Kremlin rockets also struck unspecified targets in the Khmelnytskyi region, about 180 miles west of Kyiv, the regional governor said. Elsewhere on the battlefield, Russian forces struck several towns and villages in Donetsk province in the east over 24 hours, killing one person, authorities said. A building materials superstore in the city of Donetsk was hit by a shell and erupted in flames, the mayor said. There were no immediate reports of any injuries.
Zelensky had earlier pledged that Ukraine would fight ‘until the end’, branding Russian forces ‘terrorists’ and vowing to retake all occupied territory – including Crimea, which was seized from Kyiv in 2014 after the Putin crony Viktor Yanukovych was ousted by pro-EU demonstrators.
Outgoing British Prime Minister Boris Johnson marked Ukraine’s Independence Day with a visit to Kyiv – his third since the war broke out – and other European leaders used the occasion to pledge unwavering support for Ukraine, locked in a battle that was widely expected to be a lightning conquest by Moscow but has turned into a grinding war of attrition.
The US announced a major new military aid package totaling nearly $3 billion to help Ukrainian forces fight for years to come. It comes amid Western fears that Putin could begin announcing sham referendums designed to formalize its control of occupied areas as soon as this week.
Meanwhile, Russia is planning on disconnecting Europe’s largest nuclear power plant from Ukraine’s power grid in a move that would risk a catastrophic cooling system failure, the head of Kyiv’s atomic energy company has warned.
Petro Kotin, the head of Ukraine’s state nuclear power company Energoatom, said he has seen Russian engineers’ detailed plans to cut off the Zaporizhzhia power plant from Ukraine’s power grid and instead connect it to the Russian network in the event that fighting severs the remaining power lines. Kotin fears that Vladimir Putin’s men are now targeting the plant’s power lines connecting it to Ukraine’s grid to make that scenario a reality, reports the Guardian.
If Russia’s plan goes ahead, it would lead to a catastrophic failure of the cooling systems. External power is essential not just to cool the two reactors still in operation at the Zaporizhzhia site, but also the spent radioactive fuel stored in special facilities onsite.
The dire warning comes as Ukrainian staff at the nuclear power plant, which has been occupied by Russian troops since March, said they are being tortured by FSB agents to prevent them from telling UN safety inspectors about the risks at the site.
Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) are expected to have access to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in the coming days. But workers at the occupied plant said they fear Russia will set up false flag attacks for when the IAEA inspectors arrive that they will blame on Ukraine.
Continued fighting near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant has heightened fears of a Chernobyl-style catastrophe that could affect hundreds of thousands of people. Ukraine claims Russia is essentially holding the Soviet-era nuclear plant hostage, storing weapons there and launching attacks from around it.
Kotin said that he fears Russian forces are targeting the plant’s power lines that connect the site to Ukraine’s grid so that Russia can connect the plant to their power network.
