Ukraine War News: Blasts Hit Russian Ammunition Depot in Crimea - The New York Times

The explosions came a week after blasts at a Russian air base on the peninsula destroyed several fighter jets.

A senior Ukrainian official said that an elite military unit was responsible for the latest attack.

The blasts at an ammunition storage site are near a Russian military base in Crimea.

ODESA, Ukraine — Huge explosions rocked a Russian ammunition depot on the occupied Crimean Peninsula on Tuesday morning, delivering another embarrassing blow to Moscow’s forces a week after blasts at a Russian air base in the same region destroyed several fighter jets.

A senior Ukrainian official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the operation, said that an elite Ukrainian military unit operating behind enemy lines was responsible for the explosions.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a statement that the episode was an “act of sabotage,” according to the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.

And although he did not confirm Ukraine’s involvement, Andriy Yermak, the head of the presidential office in Ukraine, said on the Telegram messaging app that the country’s armed forces would continue the “demilitarization” of Crimea and other captured territories until they achieved “the complete deoccupation of Ukrainian territories.”.

The explosion occurred at a temporary ammunition storage site near a military base, he said.

The Russian Defense Ministry said that there were no serious casualties and that the explosions damaged power lines, railroad tracks and homes.

After explosions tore through a Russian air base in Crimea last week, Russia’s Defense Ministry said the blasts had left no casualties and that no equipment had been destroyed.

Aircraft at Crimean bases have flown sorties over Ukraine, and ships of the Black Sea fleet based there have launched punishing rocket attacks on Ukrainian military positions and civilian neighborhoods.

KYIV, Ukraine — As Ukraine continued to target Russian supply lines and ammunition depots behind enemy lines on Tuesday, Russian forces unleashed a barrage of missiles and artillery fire at Ukrainian targets in towns and cities across a front line that stretches over 600 miles.

He said it had been “a long time” since Russian forces had hit so many different parts of the city at once.

Ukrainian officials said that as of Monday, 5,575 people had been evacuated over the past two weeks.

The Ukrainian military high command reported heavy fighting across the eastern front, but there were no major territorial gains claimed by either side.

Over the past 48 hours, the Ukrainian military high command reported Russian tank and artillery fire along nearly the entire line of contact in the south.

Early in the war, Russian troops surging from Crimea seized swaths of the Kherson and Zaporizhia regions that remain the key to Russia’s occupation of southern Ukraine.

Daily shelling at the complex, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which is occupied by Russian forces and operated by Ukrainian workers, has made it the first active nuclear power plant known to be at the center of fighting.

Shoigu, the Russian defense minister — discussed “conditions for the safe operation” of the complex, Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a post on the Telegram social media app.

The officials’ phone call came on the same day that the Ukrainian company that oversees the nation’s nuclear plants said that Russian forces had in the past week targeted a nearby fire station that is responsible for extinguishing blazes at the facility in the event of an emergency.

The head of the local military administration, Oleksandr Starukh, said on Tuesday that radiation levels at the plant remained “stable,” but he noted that the situation could change quickly.

“The situation is dangerous not only for the Zaporizhzhia region,” he said in an interview on Ukrainian television, adding that a mandatory evacuation zone in the case of an accident would include more than 400,000 people in the region and in a neighboring one.

“This training in urban areas is exactly what we need,” said Nick, a 25-year-old Ukrainian recruit who offered only a nickname for fear of Russian retaliation against his family.

Nick is taking part in a British-led program to provide military training to tens of thousands of Ukrainian Army recruits and staff, an effort designed to bolster local resistance to the Russian invasion.

About 2,000 recruits have completed the program and returned to Ukraine, British officials said.

The Ukrainians who gathered on Monday were part of a group of several hundred who had been flown in by British military planes and brought to an army base in Kent, a windswept corner of southeast England where British forces previously prepared for operations in Northern Ireland.

The training exercises were planned in collaboration with Ukrainian military and intelligence officials, he added, and were designed to replicate scenes they could encounter on the battlefield back home — down to the spray-painted insignia on vehicles.

The attack damaged a transit cable after it struck near an electric power plant, according to Ivan Federov, the city’s former mayor, who is in exile after being abducted by Russian forces in March and later freed in a prisoner exchange.

“But not a single guerrilla has been found,” he said, referring to the local partisan forces in the region.

A Ukrainian strike hit a Russian base in eastern Ukraine that housed mercenaries from a private military group with close ties to President Vladimir V.

Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs, shared similar images on Twitter and said that Ukraine had used the American-supplied HIMARS weapon system to hit the base.

On Monday morning, Serhiy Haidai, the head of the Ukrainian regional military administration in Luhansk, asserted that the Wagner base in Popasna had been “destroyed.”.

MYKOLAIV REGION, Ukraine — In their summer campaign to drive Russian troops from the southern region of Kherson, Ukraine’s forces have decimated Russian command centers and ammunition depots, severed supply lines with precision strikes on key bridges, and sown terror among collaborationist officials with a spate of car bombings, shootings and, Ukrainian officials said, at least one poisoning.

Cuts to Russian supply lines have not yet eroded the overwhelming advantage of Moscow’s forces in artillery, ammunition and heavy weaponry, making it difficult if not impossible for Ukrainian forces to press forward without suffering enormous casualties.

“Without question we need a counteroffensive, I sincerely believe it will come,” said a 33-year-old lieutenant with the call sign Ada, who commands an outpost of trenchworks in the neighboring Mykolaiv region, a few miles from the Russian lines in Kherson.

Even though Ukrainian troops have not moved forward for weeks in Kherson, their artillery campaign appears to have borne fruit, slowing the flow of Russian arms, equipment and troops into the region, Ukrainian officials say.

The strikes have rendered these bridges “inoperable,” said Nataliya Gumenyuk, the spokeswoman for the Ukrainian military’s southern command.

The question now is whether this pressure on Russia’s supply lines will be sufficient to cripple the fighting capacity of Russian troops and perhaps force the Kremlin to order at least part of the force to withdraw from Kherson and fall back across the river

Several Ukrainian officials in the region said this week that some Russian field commanders had already begun to move their headquarters east of the river, although two senior Ukrainian military officials said there was no evidence of this

At the front, a withering barrage of Russian strikes inevitably kills a handful of Ada’s troops each day, the lieutenant said

Ukraine’s commanders and military analysts say that any lunge forward would require vastly more troops and equipment than Ukraine has in the Kherson theater at the moment

Dmytro Marchenko, the commander of Ukraine’s forces in the region, recently acknowledged bubbling frustrations with the slow pace of Ukraine’s efforts to retake Kherson, but he said he could give no timetable for the start of major offensive actions

If the Ukrainians can fully sever the bridges over the Dnipro and keep them cut, the Kremlin will have no choice but to withdraw some forces or force Russian troops to fight with limited supplies and “hope they cope,” said Phillips P