A 500kg unexploded bomb has been removed from the top of an apartment building in Kharkiv, Ukraine.
The huge munition was removed by a 10-man specialist crew on Thursday using a forklift and crane to dislodge it from the nine-storey building.
The bomb was deactivated in March, but Ukrainian authorities had been unable to remove it until now due to Russian airstrikes on Ukraine’s second-largest city.
One of the crew members who took the device away said the city “being calm” allowed the team to remove the dangerous explosive.
Footage posted online showed the bomb slowly being winched out of the apartment building by a crane and gradually placed into a large, heavily fortified truck emblazoned with the word “demining”.
Russian airstrikes struck the city again on Tuesday and Wednesday, the worst for weeks in an area where normal life had been returning since Ukraine pushed Moscow’s forces back last month.
Kyiv characterised the strikes, which reportedly killed at least 20 people, as a bid to force Ukraine to pull resources from the main battlefields in the Donbas to protect civilians.
Oleh Synehubov, the governor of Kharkiv region, said Russians continued shelling residential districts of Kharkiv and towns within the area.
“There is no letup in the shelling of civilians by the Russian occupiers,” he wrote on the Telegram messaging app. “This is evidence that we cannot expect the same scenario as in Chernihiv or Kyiv, with Russian forces withdrawing under pressure.”
Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said in a video address that Russian forces were hitting Kharkiv to terrorise the population and force Ukraine to divert troops.
In other developments, four people were killed after a Russian military cargo plane crashed in Moscow’s western city of Ryazan, reported Interfax news agency.
The plane – II-76 military cargo aircraft – crashed and caught fire while trying to make a landing in the Russian city.
Additional reporting by agencies
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