🔴 Live: Several killed in Russian missile strikes on eastern Ukrainian city, governor says

Issued on: 08/08/2023 – 07:57

3 min

8:46am: Ukraine nuclear plants fully operational for winter, operator says

Ukrainian nuclear power plants located in territory held by Kyiv will be fully operational by winter to provide electricity for the country, Ukraine’s atomic energy operator said Monday.

“All the power at our disposal will be given to the electricity grid”, after the servicing of some reactors before winter, Energoatom chief Petro Kotin, told journalists at the Yuzhnoukrainsk plant in southern Ukraine.

Ukraine currently has three power stations with a total of nine reactors in the territory under its control.

The fourth nuclear power station, which is also the biggest in Europe, is the Zaporizhzhia plant which houses six reactors. It has been occupied by Russian forces since March 2022.

Ukrainian nuclear power stations were not “directly affected” by the wave of Russian strikes on energy infrastructure in the autumn and winter of last year, which cut off power to millions of Ukrainian homes, Kotin said.

3:41am: Several killed, scores wounded in Russian missile strikes on east Ukraine city 

Rescue workers combed through the rubble of damaged buildings in the city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine on Tuesday, the day after Russian strikes killed at least seven people.

Pokrovsk sits just 50 kilometres (30 miles) from the eastern frontline, where Moscow says it is gaining ground and repelling Ukrainian attacks. 

Two missiles – launched 40 minutes apart – damaged residential buildings, a hotel, catering establishments, shops and administrative buildings on Monday, Pavlo Kyrylenko, head of the Donetsk region’s military administration said. 

Seven people died and 67 were wounded, including two children, according to Igor Klymenko, Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs.

Those killed included a high-ranking emergency official of Donetsk region, Klymenko said.

“We are resuming the demolition of rubble,” he said early Tuesday after the rescuers “were forced to suspend work for the night due to the high threat of repeated shelling.” 

President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Monday that Moscow had struck a residential building, and shared a video on social media of civilians helping wounded people and rescuers clearing rubble from a building that had lost its top floor.

Key developments from Monday, August 7:

Two Russian missile strikes on the east Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, including on a residential building, on Monday killed at least seven people and wounded 31, Kyiv said. Earlier on Monday shelling of border areas of the Kharkiv region in northeast Ukraine and the southern city of Kherson killed three people, Ukrainian officials said.

Ukrainian troops are creating conditions to advance forward step-by-step and have the initiative on the battlefield, Ukraine’s commander-in-chief Valeriy Zaluzhnyi said on Monday. Zaluzhnyi said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app that the Ukrainian defence was stable with troops repelling Russian attempts to counter-attack and distract Ukrainian forces from other areas of the front

Read yesterday’s live blog to see how the day’s events unfolded.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP, AP and Reuters)