Kyiv - An overnight drone strike near the Ukrainian port of Odesa sparked a massive fire and explosion, the military said Monday, as Russia’s leadership faced growing resistance to its efforts to call up hundreds of thousands of men to fight in Ukraine.
The airstrike on Odesa was the latest in a series of drone attacks on the key southern city in recent days, and hit a military installation and detonated ammunition when it struck. Firefighters were struggling to contain the blaze, and civilians nearby were evacuated, the Ukrainian military’s southern command said.
It came hours after the United States vowed to take decisive action and promised “catastrophic consequences” if Russia uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Concerns are growing that Russia may seek to escalate the conflict once it completes what Ukraine and the West see as illegal referendums in parts of Ukraine under its control.
Citizens in four regions of Ukraine were voting for a fourth day on Monday in the Russian-organised referendums that Kyiv which the West branded as bogus.
Many residents fled the regions before the so-called referendums got underway, scared about being forced to vote or potentially being conscripted into the Russian army. Others described hiding behind closed doors, hoping to avoid having to answer to armed soldiers going door-to-door to collect votes.
Petro Kobernik, who left the Russian-held southern city of Kherson just before the preordained voting began Friday, said the prospect of living under Russian law and the escalating war made him and others extremely jittery about the future.
The referendums, denounced by Kyiv and its Western allies as rigged, are taking place in the Russian-controlled Luhansk and Kherson regions, and in occupied areas of the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions. They are widely viewed as a pretext for annexation, and Russian authorities are expected to announce the regions as theirs once the vote ends Tuesday.
The Kremlin has used this tactic before. In 2014, it held a hastily called referendum in Ukraine’s Crimea region to justify annexation of the Black Sea peninsula, a move that was denounced as illegitimate by most of the world.
Ukrainian authorities have told residents of the four Russian-occupied regions that they would face criminal punishment if they cast ballots and advised them to leave.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who began mobilizing more troops for the war last week, said he’s ready to use nuclear weapons to protect territory in a clear threat to Ukraine to halt its attempts to reclaim the regions.
“The Russians are seeing the citizens’ fear and reluctance to vote, so they are forced to take people in,” said Ivan Fedorov, the Ukrainian mayor of the Russia-held city of Melitopol, who was detained and held by the Russians before leaving the city.
“Groups of collaborators and Russians accompanied by armed troops go from one apartment to another, but few people open the doors,” Fedorov said. “The haste with which they organized that pseudo-referendum shows that they weren’t going to even count the ballots in earnest.”
Analysts say Putin is hoping to use the threat of military escalation to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into negotiating with the Kremlin.
“The haste with which the referendums were called shows the weakness of the Kremlin, not its strength,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Penta Center, an independent think tank based in Kyiv. “The Kremlin is struggling to find levers to influence the situation that has spun out of its control.”
The seven-month war in Ukraine has killed tens of thousands, flattened towns and cities, fueled global inflation and triggered the worst confrontation between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when the United States and the Soviet Union came closest to nuclear conflict.
-Reuters/Ap