Satellite images collected from March 24 to 26 spotlight recent damage to areas where Ukrainian troops are battling Russian forces.
The satellite images released by U.S. company Maxar show damage to a Ukrainian fuel storage facility in Kalynivka, burning buildings and damage to civilian infrastructure in Kyiv, and the battle between Russian and Ukrainian forces for the city of Izyum in eastern Ukraine.
Before/after images of damage to Ukrainian fuel storage depot at Kalynivka (Satellite image ©2022 Maxar Technologies)
Before/after images of damage to Ukrainian fuel storage depot at Kalynivka (Satellite image ©2022 Maxar Technologies)
On Saturday, Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said in an online video address that fighting was ongoing and named the southeastern city of Mariupol, the southern cities of Mykolaiv and Kherson, and the eastern town of Izyum as particular hotspots where Russian troops were on the offensive.
Ukrainian authorities also said a psychiatric hospital near the eastern town of Izyum had been hit. Emergency services said no one was hurt, but Kharkiv governor Oleh Synegubov called the attack a war crime. Reuters could not verify the report.
Moscow denies it has been targeting civilians in what it calls a “special operation” to disarm and “de-Nazify” Ukraine. Ukraine and its allies say this was a baseless pretext for Russia’s invasion of the democratic country of 44 million.
To the north, battle lines near the capital Kyiv have been frozen for weeks with two main Russian armoured columns stuck northwest and east of the city.
The Russian defence ministry said its troops had seized a dug-in command centre in a Kyiv suburb and captured more than 60 Ukrainian servicemen. Reuters could not immediately verify this.
The general staff of the Ukrainian armed forces, in a Facebook post, said Russia’s losses were such that Moscow was conducting “hidden mobilizations” and taking battle tanks out of long-term storage.
According to the Associated Press, a British intelligence report said Russian forces were relying on indiscriminate air and artillery bombardments rather than risk large-scale ground operations, a tactic the report said could limit Russian military casualties but would harm more civilians in Ukraine.
After more than four weeks of fighting, Russia has failed to seize any major Ukrainian city. The conflict has killed thousands of people, sent nearly 3.8 million fleeing and has driven more than half of Ukraine’s children from their homes, according to the United Nations.
Moscow signaled on Friday it was scaling back its military ambitions to focus on territory claimed by Russian-backed separatists in the east of Ukraine.
But on Saturday, four rockets hit the outskirts of Lviv, some 60 km (40 miles) from the Polish border for what appeared to be the first time since Moscow’s invasion. The western Ukrainian city had so far escaped the heavy bombardment and fighting that has devastated other cities closer to Russia, although missiles struck an aircraft repair facility near its international airport a week ago.
The back-to-back attacks on Saturday brought a chill to Lviv residents and displaced Ukrainians who had seen the city as a relatively safe place to rebuild their lives.
TV and radio tower before/after destruction in Izyum, eastern Ukraine
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