He warned people in Crimea to “avoid being near military facilities and facilities providing the aggressor’s army in the near future”.
“INTENSE SHELLING”
On the Russian-annexed peninsula, the governor of Sevastopol, Mikhail Razvozhayev, urged Crimeans to “remain calm” and said “nobody was hurt”
He estimated the fire was “around 1,000 square metres”.
Razvozhayev insisted that the peninsula’s reserves had not been impacted and that authorities had enough fuel for all civilian needs.
Earlier this week, Moscow said it had repelled a drone strike on Crimea – annexed by Russia in 2014 and used as a launchpad for its invasion.
In southern Ukraine, Russian occupation authorities said a key city they control – Novaya Kakhovka – had come under “intense shelling” and had been cut off from power.
The city fell to Russian forces on the first day of their invasion on Feb 24, 2022. It lies in the part of the Kherson region that Moscow still controls, having withdrawn from the eponymous regional capital last November.
Russian forces urged people in the city “to keep calm”, saying that work to restore power would start “after the shelling ends”.
RUSSIAN BORDER VILLAGES SHELLED
The shelling of Novaya Kakhovka came a day after Russian shelling killed a 57-year-old woman in a southern Ukrainian village. Zelenskyy had promised a response.
Inside Russia, security fears of an expected Ukrainian counteroffensive.
The governor of the border Belgorod region – also been hit by several attacks during the course of the war – said on Saturday that five frontier villages were without power after Ukrainian shelling.
“The power lines are damaged,” Gladkov said, adding that there had been no victims.
Elsewhere, Russia accused Poland – with whom it has historically poor relations – of a “blatant violation” of international norms after Warsaw impounded a school run by the Russian embassy in the Polish capital.
Moscow called the move an “illegal act” and promised “harsh” consequences against Warsaw.
