Footage shows artillerymen of the Ukrainian Land Forces, in cooperation with the paratroopers, firing shells and missiles onto a field full of Russian soldiers and their equipment. An array of tactical bunkers filled with enemy armoured vehicles can be seen from above before areas of the field begin to explode and fill with smoke. Several vehicles attempt to flee the bombing but further shelling prevents them from doing so.
This is the latest blow for Vladimir Putin and comes at an inopportune time ahead of Russia’s Victory Day celebrations, which are due to start at 10am (MST) today.
Russia’s largest national holiday remembers the Soviet Union’s victory over the Nazis in World War II.
Putin has repeatedly likened the war in Ukraine to the challenge the Soviet Union faced when Adolf Hitler invaded in 1941.
His primary reasons for invasion pertained to the “denazification” of Ukraine, a claim that has been repeatedly refuted by the defending nation.
Meanwhile, Russian forces bombed a village school in eastern Ukraine killing around 60 people, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said yesterday.
In his nightly address, Zelensky said: “As a result of a Russian strike on Bilohorivka in the Luhansk region, about 60 people were killed, civilians, who simply hid at the school, sheltering from shelling.”
The governor of the Luhansk region said about 90 people were sheltering at the school in Bilohorivka on Saturday when it was bombed. There was no response from Moscow to the news.
It is the latest in a series of atrocities Russia has reportedly committed after it emerged over the weekend that they had targeted a makeshift shelter with hundreds of women and children in Mariupol.
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He said: “The main thing I felt today was the world’s even greater willingness to help us … it is clear to the whole free world that Ukraine is the party of good in this war. And Russia will lose, because evil always loses.”
Putin will preside over a parade in Moscow’s Red Square today of troops, tanks, rockets, and intercontinental ballistic missiles later today.
He will make a speech that could offer clues to the future of the war, though he will be unable to announce victory in Ukraine after repeated Russian failings.
Supersonic fighters and strategic bombers are expected to engage in a fly-past over the nine domes of St Basil’s Cathedral as part of the celebrations.
And for the first time in 12 years, the Il-80 “doomsday” command plane, which would carry Russia’s most devastating missiles in the event of a nuclear war, is reported to be joining the parade.