Over 560 Ukraine National Guard soldiers killed in war: Kyiv
KYIV, Ukraine — Over 560 soldiers from Ukraine's National Guard, a force which includes the Azov regiment currently holed up in Mariupol's steelworks, have been killed since the war with Russia began, its leader said Wednesday.
Besides the 561 dead, an additional 1,697 troops had been wounded since the invasion began on February 24, National Guard chief Oleksiy Nadtochy said in an online briefing.
Wednesday's statement marked a rare move as both Ukrainian and Russian officials have been tight-lipped about their losses in the war.
Figures about troops killed in battle have very rarely been released by Ukrainian officials, with neither the defence ministry in Kyiv nor its counterpart in Moscow offering any information on their own military losses.
In mid-April, President Volodymyr Zelensky said between 2,500 and 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed while around 10,000 others had been wounded, admitting it was "difficult to say how many of them would survive".
Ukraine's National Guard, which falls under the interior ministry, was created in March 2014 as Russia seized control of the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea and massed troops on Ukraine's eastern border.
By law, it can have up to 60,000 soldiers in its ranks and has notably absorbed several self-defence groups that were on the frontline of the 2014 Maidan revolution, as well as various nationalist outfits like Azov.
Previously known as the "Azov Battalion", the unit was created in 2014 by far-right activists and first deployed against pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
It has since shaken off the far-right ideology and been integrated into the National Guard, experts say. It is now known as the "Azov Regiment" and has a reputation for being a tough fighting unit.
Kyiv on Tuesday said more than 1,000 fighters remain trapped inside the besieged Azovstal steel plant in the southern port city of Mariupol, hundreds of whom are injured.
Some Azov soldiers have also died at the plant, but it remains unclear how many.
President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday secured Turkey's crucial backing for Ukraine's NATO aspirations after winning a US pledge for cluster munitions that could inflict massive damage on Russian forces on the battlefield.
Washington's decision to deliver the controversial weapons — banned across a large part of the world but not in Russia or Ukraine — dramatically ups the stakes in the war, which entered its 500th day Saturday.
Zelensky has been travelling across Europe trying to secure bigger and better weapons for his outmatched army, which has launched a long-awaited counteroffensive that is progressing less swiftly than Ukraine's allies had hoped. — AFP
Washington's decision to supply Ukraine with ATACMS long-range missiles is "a grave mistake", Russian ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov says Wednesday.
"The White House's decision to send long-range missiles to Ukrainians is a grave mistake. The consequences of this step, which was deliberately hidden from the public, will be of the most serious nature," he says in a statement. — AFP
President Vladimir Putin says Sunday that Russian forces had made gains in their Ukraine offensive including in Avdiivka, a symbolic industrial hub.
"Our troops are improving their position in almost all of this area, which is quite vast," he says in an interview on Russian television, an extract of which was posted on social media on Sunday. "This concerns the areas of Kupiansk, Zaporizhia and Avdiivka." — AFP
The regional governor says debris from a drone destroyed over the Russian region of Belgorod, which borders Ukraine, fell on homes and killed three people, including a young child.
The air defense system "shot down an aircraft-type UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) approaching the city", says Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov, adding that the falling debris destroyed several homes.
"Most importantly, three people were killed, one of them a small child," he writes on the Telegram messaging app, accompanied by pictures of a house reduced to a pile of rubble behind red and white police tape. — AFP
Ukraine's air force says on Tuesday that it had destroyed 27 of 36 Russian attack drones overnight in the south of the country.
Ukrainian forces downed 27 "Shahed-136/131" drones in the southern Kherson, Mykolaiv and Odesa regions, the air force said on the messaging platform Telegram.
In all, Moscow had launched 36 of the Iranian-made drones from the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014, it says. — AFP
The Kremlin claims on Friday Russian forces never targeted civilian infrastructure after Ukraine blamed Moscow for a missile attack that killed over 50 people in the eastern village of Groza.
"We repeat that the Russian military does not strike civilian targets. Strikes are carried out on military targets, on places where military personnel are concentrated," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says in his daily briefing. — AFP
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