Ukraine's civilian death toll rises as Russia bombs Kherson

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Ukrainian officials said that Russian forces bombed two villages in Ukraine’s Kherson region on Sunday, killing at least seven people including an infant.

The attack comes on the same day that the Russian navy fired a warning shot at a merchant ship approaching a Ukrainian port on the Black Sea.

“The enemy continues to bomb the Kherson region,” Andriy Yermak, chief of staff to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said in a statement.

He added that the strikes targeted the villages of Stanislav and Cheroka Balka, which are located on the Dnipro River delta, southwest of the city of Kherson.

“A husband, wife and their daughter – who was only 23 days old – died as a result of enemy artillery,” said Ihor Klimenko, Ukraine’s interior minister. Hours later, he said, the couple’s 12-year-old son also died.

Terrorists will not stop killing civilians voluntarily. . . “Terrorists must be stopped by force,” Klimenko said. “They don’t understand anything else,” he added.

Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office said on Sunday that it had opened an investigation into the bombing of the Kherson region as “a violation of the laws and customs of war, as well as premeditated murder”.

Since Russia launched its all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the civilian impact has been brutal, with Ukrainian officials estimating that nearly 10,000 civilians have been killed so far, including 500 children. The strikes of the Russian army injured more than 16,000 people and destroyed 120,000 residential buildings.

Also on Sunday, a Russian warship fired warning shots and conducted a forced search of a Palau-flagged merchant cargo ship bound for Ukraine’s Port Izmail on the Danube Delta bordering NATO member Romania.

“To force the ship to stop, the Russian warship fired warning shots with automatic small arms,” the Russian Defense Ministry said, adding that the ship was allowed to move on after being searched.

The incident comes days after Ukraine announced unilaterally reopening lanes for commercial ships in an attempt to break the Russian naval blockade on its ports.

Moscow earlier this summer withdrew from a U.N.-brokered deal allowing passage for ships carrying food and threatened to treat commercial ships bound for Ukrainian ports as military targets.

On the other hand, Oleksandr Tarnavsky, commander of Ukraine’s southern forces, said on Telegram on Saturday that new lands had been liberated from Russian forces.

The Ukrainian military often takes days or longer to confirm the gains made to the public. But Ukrainian and Russian military bloggers said that the Ukrainian armed forces liberated the village of Oruzhain in the southern Donetsk region, after a grinding campaign that lasted for weeks. Reports also indicate that Ukrainian forces are about to liberate the village of Robotyn in the southern Zaporizhia region.

Analysts say Ukraine’s southern offensive is part of a counter-offensive strategy aimed at severing Russia’s land bridge to Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014 and has used since then as a military staging post.

Sergei Asksionov, the Russian leader in Crimea, said on Saturday that air defenses had intercepted several Ukrainian missiles in the latest attack on the Crimean bridge. The Crimean Bridge was not damaged. Please be calm and trust only official sources of information.”