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Topics: Ukraine, Russia, World News
Hannah Smith
A city in the east of Ukraine has been bombed to the point it 'no longer exists,' according to a regional governor.
Volnovakha, a small city located in the breakaway Donetsk People's Republic region, has been devastated by Russian artillery attacks, with forces engaging in indiscriminate bombing raids that have left more than 90% of the city's buildings either damaged or destroyed.
‘In general, Volnovakha with its infrastructure as such no longer exists,' Donetsk governor Pavlo Kyrylenko told Direct on Saturday, March 12, a day after Russian forces claimed to have taken control of the city.
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'In the city there is not any building which has not suffered from direct or collateral damage. So some buildings have major destruction, some minor destruction, some are completely destroyed to the ground,' local MP Dmytro Lubinets said.
The vast majority of Volnovakha's 21,000 residents have long since fled the city, and it appears that most will have nothing to return to.
The scale of civilian casualties in the city is as yet unclear, but The Guardian has reported that the devastation is so extreme that bodies have been left uncollected in the streets, as those who remain are trapped in basements amid constant bombardment, cut off from access to food, water and electricity.
Volnavakha is located to the north of Mariupol, a larger city which has also come under intense siege from Russian troops. Multiple attempts to establish humanitarian corridors from both cities to the neighbouring region of Zaporizhzhia have failed after the routes came under fire from Russian troops despite an agreed ceasefire, with the Red Cross warning that some of the evacuation routes had been mined.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Russia is attempting to wage a 'war of annihilation' against his country after failing to capture its major cities in the opening stages of its invasion, and accused the Russians of deliberately blocking civilians from leaving cities which had come under attack.
The brutality of the bombardment mirrors similar tactics used to terrorise civilian populations in Aleppo, Syria and Grozny in Chechnya, where Russian air forces have been accused of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Zelenskyy has previously vowed revenge on Russian troops who have targeted civilians saying: 'We will not forgive, we will not forget, we will punish everyone who committed atrocities in this war on our land.'
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