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Deadly Attack Hits Ukrainian Town After Zelensky Denounces Russia’s ‘Absurd’ Security Council Presidency Russian Shelling Kills 6 as Assault Stalls in Ukraine’s East
(about 5 hours later)
Russian forces launched a deadly attack on the town of Kostyantynivka in eastern Ukraine on Sunday, hours after Ukraine’s leader denounced Russia’s ability to assume the presidency of the United Nations Security Council, given Moscow’s ongoing aggression. Russian shelling blasted apartment blocks, homes and a preschool in eastern Ukraine on Sunday, killing six civilians, even as evidence mounted that Moscow has failed to make much progress in its campaign to seize the whole of the region.
Six people were killed and eight were wounded when “massive shelling” hit Kostyantynivka, according to Andriy Yermak, a top adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. In a post on the Telegram messaging app, he added that 16 apartment buildings were damaged, along with private homes, a preschool and other buildings in the industrial town. The claims could not be independently verified. For months, the fighting in the Donbas, an industrial and agricultural region close to the Russian border, has been the scene of grinding battles that have sapped the strength of both armies.
Kostyantynivka is about 15 miles from the city of Bakhmut, where Ukrainian forces have been locked in a brutal, monthslong battle to fend off Russian troops. Mr. Zelensky stopped in the town late last month as part of a morale-boosting tour to thank soldiers involved in the defense of Bakhmut. But while Russia has struggled to gain territory against Ukraine’s military, it has regularly launched attacks on civilians. The latest such attack involved the shelling of a town around 15 miles west of the frontline, Kostyantynivka, that killed three men and three women and wounded 11 others, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
The attack there on Sunday drove home Mr. Zelensky’s furious response to Russia’s assumption of the Security Council Presidency, which he said was “obviously absurd and destructive.” The attack damaged numerous apartment buildings, spraying wet earth and shrapnel. Soldiers helped civilians clear away rubble and cover broken windows with plywood. Workers found the body of one of the victims, an elderly man, next to a huge crater in his vegetable garden.
Russia is scheduled on Monday to preside over a Security Council meeting for the first time since it began the full-scale war in Ukraine almost 14 months ago. The Security Council aims to maintain international peace and security, and the role of the presidency is a largely ceremonial one, taken for a month at a time in alphabetical order by each of the council’s 15 members. “What will we do at night? Not a single window is left!” said Nadia Peskun, 61, who lives in the town with her daughter and twin 11-year-old granddaughters. She added: “We all hid here in the corridor, hugging one another and screaming.”
It has come to Moscow weeks after President Vladimir V. Putin was accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court. The situation is a reminder that Ukraine and its allies, most notably the United States and Europe, have not always been successful in isolating Russia economically and politically to punish the Kremlin for the war. An hour after the strike, the children were still sitting in corridors away from windows, playing on tablets and not lifting their eyes.
“Yesterday, the Russian army killed another Ukrainian child — a 5-month-old boy named Danylo,” Mr. Zelensky said in his nightly address on Saturday. “And at the same time, Russia chairs the U.N. Security Council. It is hard to imagine something evident that proves the complete bankruptcy of such institutions.” The civilian toll in Donbas, which is made up of parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, has been enormous. According to United Nations data, more than half of the roughly 18,000 civilians killed in Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale offensive in February of 2022 have died in those two regions.
The last time Russia held the presidency, President Vladimir V. Putin declared the start of the “special military operation,” the term used by the Kremlin to describe its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. His announcement came as the Security Council was holding an emergency meeting in the hopes of stopping an invasion. But the Kremlin’s main objective in the east is conquest, and Russian forces have been stymied by the Ukrainian defenders. Russia’s military bloggers and like-minded activists have in recent weeks lamented the lack of progress from the winter campaign. Russia has not secured victory in the city of Bakhmut, or in the towns or Avdiivka, Vuhledar, Lyman or Marinka.
At least two countries on the 15-member Security Council — China, a permanent member, and the United Arab Emirates — have avoided openly blaming Russia for the war, instead calling for both sides to cease hostilities. Ukraine is not a current member, but Mr. Zelensky implored those countries to change tack. “The winter campaign in the Donbas is over,” said Igor Girkin, a former Russian intelligence officer who led a military intervention in eastern Ukraine and now blogs about military affairs. “We can say that the winter campaign ended unsuccessfully.” The comments by Mr. Girkin, who uses the nickname Strelkov, were echoed by others in Russia who have ties to the military and have at times been critical of the Kremlin’s approach to the war.
“It is important when the states that are neutral in the military-political sense nevertheless take a clear moral position towards Russian terror, towards Russia’s destruction of the global order based on rules,” Mr. Zelensky said. Russia’s winter offensive followed a series of battlefield setbacks last fall. In the early days of the invasion, Ukraine was also successful in fending off the toppling of its government in Kyiv.
Western officials have said that there is no legal path for removing Russia from its permanent seat at the Security Council, which set up Moscow’s presidency for the month of April. While Russia will not hold increased influence during its term in the presidency, it will manage the agenda for meetings. Moscow has had more success weathering the diplomatic isolation imposed by Kyiv’s Western allies, aimed at punishing the Kremlin and eroding its ability to wage the war. For instance, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, made a three-day state visit to Moscow last month.
Ukrainian officials say more than 450 children are among the thousands of civilians who have been killed in the war and almost twice as many wounded. They also accuse Russia of forcibly moving almost 20,000 Ukrainian children to its territory. In a further example of Moscow’s continued global prominence, Russia assumed the rotating presidency of the U.N. Security Council on Saturday, a prestigious if largely ceremonial post it will give up next month.
Last week, Ukraine’s allies announced that they would task the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, an intergovernmental group, to formally investigate the widespread reports of forced child deportations, which also formed a key part of the International Criminal Court’s accusations against Russia. Russia’s assumption of the post — just two weeks after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russian on accusations of war crimes — elicited a furious response from Mr. Zelensky, who called it “obviously absurd and destructive.”
“This crime committed by Russia is one of the most cynical and anti-human crimes of our time,” Mr. Zelensky said. He attacked not just Moscow but the structure of a system that allows Russia, a permanent member of the Security Council, to take the U.N. leadership post even as it prosecutes a war condemned by much of the world, saying it “proves the complete bankruptcy of such institutions.”
Russian officials were unfazed by the criticism over its assumption of the Security Council presidency. Dmitry Polyanskiy, a deputy Russian ambassador to the United Nations, said his country would act as an “honest broker.” Russia took over the Security Council presidency on Saturday, just a few days after the deterioration of its international relationships were underscored by its arrest of Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter. The Russian authorities accuse him of espionage, which the United States and the newspaper call a bogus charge.
“Any attempts to provoke us are doomed to fail in advance,” he said on Saturday, according to the Russian news agency Tass. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said that he had spoken with his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, on Sunday and demanded Mr. Gershkovich’s release. Mr. Blinken said on Twitter that he had expressed “grave concern over Russia’s unacceptable detention of a U.S. citizen journalist.”
The baby invoked by Mr. Zelensky in his overnight address died in a Russian attack on Avdiivka, a town in Ukraine’s east that has recently been subjected to increased bombardment from Russian troops engaged in a weekslong offensive across a broad front of eastern Ukraine that has seen little territory change hands. Even as Russia exerts its influence on the international stage, it has been paid dearly on the battlefield. Ukraine has suffered high casualties, too, but some military experts say those faced by Russia have been far higher.
On Sunday, Mr. Zelensky noted that it had been a year since Russian forces were driven out of the Kyiv region and renewed his vow that the rest of his country would be liberated. A Ukrainian military expert, Oleksiy Melnyk, said that two factors in particular had served to impede Russia’s campaign this year. The first was the battle for the town of Vuhledar in Donetsk, in which elite Russian forces sustained severe losses, including tanks and other armored vehicles. The second was Kyiv’s decision not to abandon Bakhmut as Russia advanced around the city, including capturing the nearby town of Soledar.
“The first offensives, the first achievements, the first liberated territories. It’s been a year since we expelled the invaders from the Kyiv region,” he wrote on Telegram, adding: “And we will free all our lands. We will return the Ukrainian flag to all our cities and communities.” “The Russian offensive campaign is about to end,” Mr. Melnyk said in an interview. “It seems they will not try a major offensive any time soon.”
For Mr. Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials, that pledge applies not just to the territory Russia has captured since it launched its full-scale invasion more than 13 months ago, but also to Crimea, the peninsula that Russia illegally annexed in 2014. But he cautioned that the Kremlin appeared to be laying plans for a protracted conflict, aiming to drain Ukraine’s fighting strength over time and waiting for international support for the government in Kyiv to wane.
Underscoring that those goals have not changed, Oleksiy Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, on Sunday released a detailed 12-step plan to “de-occupy” Crimea. Many military experts in the United States and elsewhere have started to measure the modest gains of Russia’s offensive against what they expect to be a Ukrainian counteroffensive in the coming weeks. Some analysts, however, noted that there would be little disappointment within Russia, because the campaign had not been widely discussed by state media.
Laid out in a Facebook post, the steps of the plan range from installing a monument to the Ukrainian soldiers stationed on Snake Island in the Black Sea who used an expletive to rebuff a Russian warship’s demands to surrender, to dismantling the Kerch Strait Bridge connecting Russia to Crimea, and imposing criminal punishments on anyone who worked with Russian occupiers. Dmitri Kuznets, a military analyst who writes about the war for Meduza, an independent Russian-language news site published in Latvia, downplayed the long-term significance of the offensive for Moscow, arguing that it was not possible to judge without knowing its precise objectives.
“We will know the result of this entire winter campaign for both Russia and Ukraine only after the Ukrainian counteroffensive happens,” he said in an interview.
Both sides have also been building up their forces in southern Ukraine, where Moscow suffered a major setback last fall. Retaking the Crimea region, which Russia annexed illegally in 2014, is a major territorial objective of the government in Kyiv. But to do so, it will need to capture ground on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River in the Zaporizhzhia region.
If and when Ukraine does launch its counteroffensive, it can make use of stocks of weapons supplied in recent months by the United States and other allies and deploy newly trained soldiers.
Mr. Menlyk, the Ukrainian military expert, said the counteroffensive could come in the next few weeks, “once the ground becomes suitable for tanks to move across open fields.”
Cassandra Vinograd, Vivek Shankar and Yurii Shyvala contributed reporting.