The attack, reported by Russia’s Baza news agency, is among the most violent protests to date against the war in Ukraine and comes just a week after a car bomb in the capital killed Darya Dugina, an up-and-coming pro-government journalist. Kremlin. Police told Baza that a woman doused Yevgeny Sektarev’s BMW X6 with gasoline before setting it on fire. Photos showed the shattered wreckage of the car’s boot parked outside a block of flats. Sekretarev is the deputy head of the 8th Directorate of the Russian General Staff, the department responsible for censoring soldiers and officers. The woman told police she burned the car as an anti-war protest, according to Baza. Vladimir Putin’s regime has arrested thousands of people simply for expressing their dissent against the war, an offense that now carries a maximum sentence of fifteen years in prison. Public protest has been limited as a result, but saboteurs have bombed army recruitment centers and hacked government websites.
Recent incidents have increased anxiety in Moscow
Before Dugina’s murder, Moscow felt very distant from the war in Ukraine. But the attack on a wealthy neighborhood, which Russia blamed on Ukraine, has alarmed the capital’s elite. Kyiv says it had nothing to do with the killing, with officials pointing the finger at Russian intelligence. The burning of Sektarev’s car came as Russian forces stepped up attacks in eastern Ukraine to drive Ukrainian units away from the southern front, where Kyiv is reportedly planning a major offensive to retake the Kherson region. But despite intensifying attacks on Shiversk and Bakhmut, north of the city of Donetsk, the British Ministry of Defense said Russian forces had made little progress. “Overall, Russian forces have made few territorial gains,” he said in the daily intelligence briefing. Journalists reporting from Bahamut, which had a pre-war population of 72,000, said most residents had now fled the city. The video showed empty streets inhabited by stray dogs, some of them pets abandoned in hasty evacuations. The explosion of artillery exchanges combines video from Bahamut. Many of its buildings are now in ruins. Ukrainian officials said several civilians were killed in the Russian shelling. As the Kremlin continues its assault on the Donbass, Ukraine’s government has ordered more civilians to be evacuated from more areas. In addition to ordering civilians in Donetsk to leave, the Ukrainian government also told people living in the eastern region of Kharkiv, southern Zaporizhia and Mykolaiv to leave their homes. “I call on people to evacuate and not hope that the enemy shows mercy,” said Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister.
Ukraine plans to retake Kherson
The Ukrainian government has already told people to leave the city of Kherson where it is planning an attack. The Russian army captured the city of Kherson in the first days of the war, and its officials have since tried to turn it into an enviable model of life under their control. But residents said the Russian occupiers rule with fear, arresting and torturing dissidents. They also said that jobs and food are running out and the economy is collapsing. These complaints are not limited to Kherson. In Mariupol, destroyed in the first six weeks of the war by intense Russian bombardment, the promised reconstruction failed. Instead, Russian news agencies were limited to reporting the installation of the city’s first traffic lights this week. Mr Putin also made an uncharacteristic omission that parts of Ukraine occupied by Russia were proving unattractive places for families to live. He said the Kremlin would pay 10,000 rubles, around £142, to the parents of each child enrolled in the school. in these areas. Even so, the Institute for the Study of War said referendums on Russian membership planned by the Kremlin for next month are unlikely to happen due to “ongoing friction within the occupation administrations and ongoing party attacks”. Over the past two months, rebels operating in the occupied Kherson region have killed at least three pro-Russian senior officials and wounded several police officers, preventing locals from cooperating with the occupiers.
