KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – Russia’s military fired a missile barrage at an airfield in central Ukraine on Saturday, killing at least three people, while Ukrainian forces launched rocket strikes on river crossings in a Russian-occupied southern region.
The missile attacks on key infrastructure on the 150th day of Russia’s war in Ukraine marked new attempts by the warring parties to tip the scales of the grinding conflict in their favour.
In Ukraine’s central Kirovohradska region, 13 Russian missiles struck an airfield and a railway facility. Gov. Andriy Raikovych said that at least one serviceman and two guards were killed. The regional administration reported the strikes near the city of Kirovohrad, wounded another 13 people.
In the southern Kherson region, which Russian troops seized early in the invasion, Ukrainian forces preparing for a potential counteroffensive fired rockets at Dnieper River crossings to try to disrupt supplies to the Russians.
The new attacks came hours after Moscow and Kyiv signed deals with the United Nations and Turkey that were intended to avert a global food crisis. The agreements clear the way for the shipment of millions of tons of Ukrainian grain and some Russian exports of grain and fertilizer held up by the war.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly video address that the agreements offer “a chance to prevent a global catastrophe — a famine that could lead to political chaos in many countries of the world, in particular in the countries that help us.”
Despite the progress on that front, fighting raged unabated in eastern Ukraine’s industrial heartland of the Donbas, where Russian forces tried to make new gains in the face of stiff Ukrainian resistance.
Russian troops also have faced Ukrainian counterattacks but largely held their ground in the Kherson region just north of the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014.
Earlier this week, the Ukrainians bombarded the Antonivskyi Bridge across the Dnieper River using the U.S.-supplied High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), Kirill Stremousov, deputy head of the Russia-appointed regional administration in Kherson, said.
Stremousov told Russian state news agency Tass that the only other crossing of the Dnieper, the dam of the Kakhovka hydroelectric plant, also came under attack from rockets launched with the weapons supplied by Washington but wasn’t damaged.
HIMARS, which fires GPS-guided rockets at targets 80 kilometres (50 miles) away, a distance that puts it out of reach of most Russian artillery systems, has significantly bolstered the Ukrainian strike capability.
In addition, Ukrainian forces shelled an automobile bridge across the Inhulets River in the village of Darivka, Stremousov told Tass. He said the bridge just east of the regional capital of Kherson sustained seven hits but remained open to traffic.
Stremousov said that unlike the Antonivskyi Bridge, the small bridge in Darivka has no strategic value.
Since April, the Kremlin has concentrated on capturing the Donbas, a mostly Russian-speaking region of eastern Ukraine where pro-Russia separatists have proclaimed independence.
However, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov emphasized Wednesday that Moscow plans to retain control of other areas its forces occupy during the war.