A resident of Nikopol, Ukraine, in his backyard last month, with smoke rising from an area on the opposite bank of the Dnipro River. Credit…David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
Russian forces killed at least 13 civilians and wounded 11 others in an overnight missile attack in southern Ukraine, a senior Ukrainian military official said Wednesday, in escalating fighting around a key nuclear power plant in power of Moscow
The Russians used Grad missiles in the attack in the Nikopol district, across the Dnipro River from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, according to the head of the Dnipropetrovsk military administration, Valentyn Reznichenko. He said the Russians had fired 80 rockets at residential neighborhoods, damaging apartment blocks, administrative buildings and infrastructure, and leaving 1,000 people without gas.
Russian forces launched a “deliberate and insidious strike when people were sleeping in their homes,” Mr. Reznichenko on the Telegram social messaging app. He said 10 residents were hospitalized, seven of them in serious condition.
In his late-night speech on Wednesday, President Volodymr Zelensky said Ukraine would not let “the Russian shelling of the Dnipropetrovsk region go unanswered.”
A photograph released by the State Emergency Service of Ukraine on Wednesday showed a damaged school building in the city of Marhanets in the Dnipropetrovsk region. Credit… State Emergency Service of Ukraine, via Reuters
In recent weeks, Russia has strengthened its positions in Kherson province, which borders Dnipropetrovsk, and has targeted a series of missile attacks there and in nearby provinces. According to Ukrainian officials, those attacks have included fire aimed at Nikopol from the Zaporizhzhia plant, which Russian forces captured in March shortly after invading Ukraine in February.
It was not clear whether the night attack had come from the nuclear plant grounds. On Saturday, rocket fire hit a dry spent fuel storage facility at the same plant. Ukraine and Russia blamed each other for the episode, prompting the head of the UN nuclear watchdog, Rafael Mariano Grossi, to express “deep concern” and renew his calls for a formal inspection from the central
Ukrainian authorities, as well as independent military and nuclear experts, say the transformation of the plant, Europe’s largest, into a combat zone is almost unprecedented. They also say that Russia’s use of the site as a base from which to launch attacks offers a tactical advantage, as it is extremely difficult for Ukraine to return fire without endangering the plant’s reactors.
On Wednesday, the foreign ministers of the Group of Seven major industrialized democracies, meeting in Germany, issued a statement demanding that Russia withdraw its forces from Ukraine and immediately return control of the nuclear complex to Ukraine. The statement blamed Russia’s military actions around the plant for “significantly increasing the risk of a nuclear accident or incident,” putting the entire region at risk.
Fighting in the south is intensifying as Ukrainian forces receive an influx of long-range artillery from the United States and other Western countries, increasing their ability to strike Russian military infrastructure far behind the front lines. A Ukrainian official said Ukrainian forces were responsible for an explosion Tuesday at a Russian airbase on the western coast of Crimea, the peninsula Moscow illegally seized in 2014, but said a domestically manufactured weapon in the attack.
Ukrainian forces have also attempted to mount a counteroffensive in Kherson province, aiming to retake the provincial capital, the city of Kherson, which is more than 100 miles downstream from the nuclear power plant.
Russia’s attacks in the south appear intended in part to increase pressure on Ukraine’s military given the counteroffensive, but also fit a broader pattern established since the war began of raining fire on civilian areas . Moscow denies targeting civilians.
Russian forces captured the last city in Luhansk province in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region in early July after a sustained artillery bombardment and street fighting that lasted weeks. Since then, however, their advance into Donetsk province has slowed and both sides have generally been depleted by heavy losses in more than five months of fighting.
A British military intelligence report said on Wednesday that in response to its losses, Russia is likely to have established a major new ground force formation, the 3rd Army Corps, based east of Moscow. But the new formation is “unlikely to be decisive for the campaign” in Ukraine, the report said, and may have trouble attracting enough recruits because of limited public support for the war effort.
“It is very likely that Russian commanders will continue to face the competing operational priorities of bolstering the Donbas offensive and strengthening defenses against anticipated Ukrainian counterattacks in the south,” the report said.