New long-range weapons will not target Russia, Ukraine says as rocket attacks and fierce fighting continue

Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said on Sunday that Kyiv would not use new long-range weapons from the West to strike targets in Russia. “We always tell our partners that we take an obligation not to use the weapons of foreign partners against the territory of Russia, only against their units in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine for the purpose of de-occupying our land,” he said. The United States on Friday announced a new US$2.2 billion package of arms and munitions for Ukraine, which the Pentagon said included a new rocket-propelled precision bomb that could nearly double Kyiv’s strike range against Russian forces. They potentially give Kyiv’s forces the ability to strike anywhere in the Russian-occupied Donbas, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, as well as the northern part of occupied Crimea. Ukraine restores power after substation fire, beats back Bakhmut attack Five people were injured in Russian rocket attacks Sunday in the centre of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, officials said. Kharkiv regional governor Oleh Syniehubov said four people were injured when a Russian S-300 missile fell near a block of flats and another was hurt when a missile hit a higher-education building. Local media reports said the building hit was the National Academy for Urban Economy, about 700 metres from the city’s central square. Meanwhile, heavy fighting continued in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, one of four regions that Russia illegally annexed last year even though its forces do not fully control the region. Donetsk governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said five civilians were wounded in rocket attacks during the night in the city of Druzhkivka and that the town of Avdiivka and its outskirts were also fired on. In the Black Sea port of Odesa, workers laboured to connect temporary generators shipped in to try to restore electricity. The city and surrounding area were plunged into darkness over the weekend following a large-scale network failure. Grid operator Ukrenergo said that the failure involved equipment “repeatedly repaired” after Russia’s savage strikes on Ukraine’s energy grid, and that residents should brace themselves for lengthy blackouts. As of Sunday afternoon, about 280,000 customers remained without power, said prime minister Denis Shmyhal. The head of Russia’s private Wagner militia said on Sunday that fierce fighting was ongoing in the northern parts of the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, which has been the focus of Russian forces’ attention for weeks. Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the founder and head of the Wagner group, said his soldiers were “fighting for every street, every house, every stairwell” against Ukrainian forces who were not retreating. Russian forces have been attempting to encircle and capture Bakhmut, a city in the eastern Donbas region, for weeks, and appear to be making slow, grinding and costly progress. Britain’s defence ministry said on Sunday Russia had made “small advances” in its attempt to encircle Bakhmut. If Russian forces manage to capture the city, which has been decimated by months of artillery shelling, it would be their most important strategic advance since last summer, when an initial offensive through the east of Ukraine came to a halt and was eventually reversed in a series of stunning Ukrainian counter offensives in the second half of 2022. Germany’s prosecutor general said on Sunday that his office had collected “hundreds” of pieces of evidence showing war crimes by Russian forces in Ukraine, calling for an international effort to bring leaders to justice. “At the moment we are focusing on mass killings in Bucha and attacks on Ukraine’s civil infrastructure,” prosecutor Peter Frank told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper. He said most of the evidence came from interviews with Ukrainian refugees, and the goal was now to “prepare for a possible later court case – whether in Germany or with our foreign partners or an international court”. Frank’s office has previously used the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows the prosecution of certain grave crimes regardless of where they took place, to try Syrians over atrocities committed during the country’s civil war. Under the same principle, a group of people from Myanmar last month filed a criminal complaint in Germany, accusing their country’s military of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Reporting by Agence France-Presse, Associated Press, Reuters