Swedish volunteer killed in grenade attack in Donetsk Oblast as Russian shelling continues

A 28-year-old foreign volunteer was killed in Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast on Tuesday. According to Kyiv Independent, the Swedish resident was hit by a grenade in the chest. As a formidable war continues to ravage Eastern Europe, hundreds of foreign nationals- including press and aid workers- have come under attack alongside thousands of Ukrainians. 

Meanwhile, Russian troops have continued to strike cities and villages in Ukraine’s south and industrial east. On Tuesday, they fired missiles on Kramatorsk, leading to the death of one person and injuring ten other residents. Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko, later confirmed the attack on a ten-story apartment saying that the hypersonic air-to-air R-37 missile was used. In a separate attack, Putin’s forces killed two individuals and partially obliterated a residential building in Sloviansk, State Emergency Services said.

“There was no one here. Everything is ruined,” said Halyna Maydannyk, a resident of one burned apartment in Kramatorsk. “Who knows why they’re doing this? We were all living peacefully.”

Odesa targeted by cruise missiles

Meanwhile, on Odesa, Russian troops fired seven Kalibr cruise missiles overnight, injuring six people. Russian Ministry of Defence later justified the attack stating that  strikes on the village of Bilenke achieved a legitimate military goal and “destroyed depots of ammunition for weapons supplied by the United States and European countries.” But, Serhiy Bratchuk, the speaker of the Odesa regional government, nullified the claim, saying that Russia was attacking them as a part of its war tactic of intimidation.

“These strikes on peaceful people have one goal — to intimidate the population and the authorities and keep them in constant tension,” Bratchuk told Ukrainian television.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s embattled president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on Monday, expanded the shakeup of his security services by suspending 28 more officers. A day earlier, he dismissed two senior officials over allegations that their agencies contained “collaborators and traitors.” Separately, Tass reported that Russia has claimed to have neutralised more than 250 'foreign fighters' using high-precision missile strikes at the temporary deployment point for mercenaries of the "so-called Ukrainian Foreign Legion" in the Kostantinovka region of Donetsk. The war in Ukraine started on February 24. 

(Image: AP)

(With inputs from AP)