Russia on Tuesday pulled back troops and civilian administrators from towns on the bank of the Dnipro River opposite Kherson in signs that Moscow might be retreating further after surrendering its biggest Ukrainian prize last week.
Following a pattern in recent weeks of lashing out far from the front after battlefield losses, Russia fired long range strikes at the capital Kyiv, where air raid sirens rang out, two explosions were heard and columns of smoke rose into the sky.
Local officials reported explosions in several cities across Ukraine in what they described as a wave of Russian missile strikes. Kyiv's mayor said Russian missiles hit two residential buildings.
There was no immediate word of casualties after the mayors of the capital Kyiv and the western city of Lviv reported explosions, and Interfax Ukraine news agency said blasts were heard in the northeastern city of Kharkiv. Public broadcaster Suspilne reported explosions in the northern city of Zhytomyr.
Moscow had said last week it was pulling its troops across the wide Dnipro to positions that were easier to defend on the opposite bank, abandoning the only regional capital captured since its invasion in February.
But video images filmed in the town of Oleshky, across a collapsed bridge from Kherson, appeared to show Russian forces had abandoned bunkers there too. Further east, Russian-installed administrators said they were pulling out civil servants from Nova Kakhovka on the river bank next to a huge, strategic dam.
Natalya Humenyuk, a Ukrainian military spokesperson, said Moscow appeared to be repositioning its artillery 15-20 km (10-15 miles) further from the river, to protect its guns from Ukrainian counter strikes.
”There is a certain activity of enemy troops on the left bank of the Dnipro in terms of moving 15-20 km away from the bank,” she said. Russia had artillery still capable of striking Kherson from those new positions, but ”we also have something to answer with”, she said.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told world leaders there would be no let-up in Ukraine’s military campaign to drive Russian troops out of his country.
”We will not allow Russia to wait it out, build up its forces, and then start a new series of terror and global destabilisation,” he said in an address by video link to a summit of the G20 big economies in Indonesia.
"I am convinced now is the time when the Russian destructive war must and can be stopped.”
Ukrainian forces mobbed by joyous residents swept into Kherson in recent days to claim the biggest prize of the war so far, a city that Russian President Vladimir Putin had proclaimed six weeks ago would be Russian forever.
(Edited by : Anushka Sharma)
