UMAN, Ukraine (AP) – Relatives and friends cried by coffins on Sunday as they buried children and others killed in a Russian missile attack on this central Ukraine city.
Nearly all of his 23 people killed in Friday’s attack died when two rockets smashed into a home in Uman. Ukraine’s Interior Minister Ihor Klimenko said six children had died.
Mikhail Shulha, 6, cried and hugged a relative next to the coffin of his 11-year-old sister Sophia Shulha at Sunday’s funeral.
While the mourners held candles, signed the cross and sang, the priest “Quickly Hear” of the Church of Our Lady’s Icon waved a vessel of incense over the coffin. He said the death hit the entire community hard.
“I live nearby,” said Father Fyodor Bots. “I have personally known children, little ones, since childhood, and have personally baptized them in this church. I live here, so I worry about everyone.
“I pray that the war will end and peace will come to our homes, our cities and our country,” he said.
People brought flowers and photos of the victims to the woman’s damaged building.
His 14-month-long war in Russia claimed more lives elsewhere on Sunday.
The governor of the region bordering Russia and Ukraine said four people were killed in the Ukrainian missile strike.According to Bryansk governor Alexander Bogomaz, the rocket was fired in the village of Szemka, nine kilometers from the Ukrainian border. It hit homes. He said two other residents were injured and the defense system knocked out some of the incoming artillery shells. Bryansk and the adjacent Belgorod region were subjected to sporadic cross-border shelling throughout the war. In March, he reportedly killed two people in an invasion by Ukrainian saboteurs in the Bryansk region.
Also on Sunday, Oleksandr Prokudin, his governor, said Ukraine’s Kherson region had been hit by Russian artillery 27 times in the past 24 hours, killing one civilian.
An expected Ukrainian counteroffensive in the spring could focus on the Kherson region, the gateway to Crimea and other Russian-controlled areas in southern Ukraine’s mainland. Ukrainian forces forces drove Russian forces out of the regional capital Kherson last year, a significant defeat for Russia.
Ukrainian President Volodymy Zelenskyy said the counteroffensive wouldn’t wait for the delivery of all promised military equipment.
“I would have really wanted to wait for everything that was promised,” Zelenskyy told Finnish, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian journalists. “But it happens that the terms (of weapons deliveries and counteroffensive), unfortunately, do not coincide a little bit. And, I will say frankly, we pay attention to the weather.”
Ukraine is particularly hopeful that it will receive Western fighter jets, but Zelenskyy said his forces won’t delay the counteroffensive for that, so as not to “reassure Russia that we still have a few months to train on the planes, and only then will we start.”
Zelenskyy said he spoke Sunday with French President Emmanuel Macron about the weapons supply, and was pleased with its “speed and specificity.”
Macron’s office said he reiterated France’s commitment to provide Ukraine “all the aid necessary to restore its sovereignty and territorial integrity,” and discussed long-term European military aid. The leader of the Russian Wagner mercenary group, which is leading the country’s fighting in the eastern Ukraine city of Bakhmut, has given a more precise schedule for the Ukrainian counterattack. Ukrainian forces will launch a counteroffensive by May 15, by which time the heavy rains will have stopped and the ground will be dry enough to move tanks and artillery, Wagner founder Evgeny Prigozhin said in a public statement on Saturday. said in a video interview with a Russian journalist.
In other battlefield deployments, Ukraine’s Northern Command said the Sumy and Chernihiv regions adjacent to Bryansk and Belgorod were hit by 11 shells on Sunday night.
