STEWART CARR FROM DAILY MAIL
Vladimir Putin has rained down hell on Ukraine’s port city of Odessa with a powerful missile strike – just as the city’s large Jewish population marks the holy day of Yom Kippur.
Russian invaders are believed to have struck the Hotel Odessa – a military target used as a training centre – with local reports that the building is caught up in flames.
Other reports describe a ‘continuous attack’ on the Black Sea port lasting for over an hour, as Russia fired an arsenal of shahed missiles.
Oleg Veretskiy posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, listing the invaders’ weaponry as ‘Onyx, Calibers and Shaheds’.
He added: ‘I don’t remember such a dense attack on Odessa for a long time. It was loud. Right next to us. We survived. The air raid alert has been cancelled.’
Russia likely hit “Odessa Hotel” in the port of Odesa. Another high-value military target pic.twitter.com/witSzjWwrD
— Giorgi Revishvili (@revishvilig) September 24, 2023
Russian invaders are believed to have struck the Hotel Odessa – a military target used as a training centre – with local reports that the building is caught up in flames
Many of Odessa’s population of over 12,000 Jews were marking the end of their fasting period on the holy day of Yom Kippur when the missiles struck.
Since its founding in 1795, Odessa has been home to a large population of Jews – outnumbering any other ethnic group until the mid-20th century.
Explosions have also been reported in Sevastopol in the Crimea, temporarily occupied by Russia.
The attacks come as President Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine grinded into its 20th month with no tangible sign of victory.
Yesterday, Russian air strikes killed two people and wounded three others in Ukraine‘s Kherson province – just days after two were killed and eight others injured in a strike on Sunday.
Russian forces have repeatedly struck the city of Beryslav, destroying an unspecified number of private houses.
A woman was killed in the latest strike and three people were wounded, including a police officer, according to the region’s governor Oleksandr Prokudin.
Another air strike also killed a 67-year-old man in the village of Lvove, Mr Prokudin said without specifying the type of weapons used in the attack.
The communities hit are both located in the Ukrainian-controlled part of the Kherson region, where the Dnieper River has marked a battle line since November 2022, when Russian forces retreated across it, boosting the invaded country’s morale.
The sky over Odesa tonight as the city is under continuous attack for over an hour now… Shaheeds, then missiles, then drones again… pic.twitter.com/u4fFEVOhzb
— OscarDomesticated (@OscDomesticated) September 24, 2023
Gov. Oleksandr Prokudin said Russian forces struck the city of Beryslav, destroying an unspecified number of private houses. A woman was killed and three people were wounded, including a police officer, he said.
Another airstrike killed a 67-year-old man in the village of Lvove, Prokudin said without specifying the type of weapons used in the attack.
In the city of Kherson, the region’s capital, a total of five people were wounded Sunday as the result of repeated Russian bombing, the governor said.
The communities hit are both located in the Ukraine-controlled part of the Kherson region, where the Dnieper River that bisects the province has marked a battle line since Russian troops withdrew across it in November 2022, a retreat that boosted the invaded country’s morale.
The Russians regrouped on the river’s eastern bank and regularly shell cities and villages across the river, including the city of Kherson that was occupied early on in the war but retaken by Ukrainian forces more than 10 months ago.
In another front-line Ukrainian region, Donetsk, the Russian-installed authorities on Sunday imposed a number of restrictions on the occupied areas: a curfew from 11 p.m. till 4 a.m. on weekdays, a ban on any rallies or protests, and military censorship of any correspondence, online messages and phone conversations. It wasn’t immediately clear how such a censorship would operate.
