Russia has obliterated Ukraine’s ‘Palace of Culture’ with an enormous missile strike that cracked open the building and sent smoke and dust billowing into the air.
A new video shows the missile strike, fired from a strategic bomber that took place yesterday in the Lozova region of Kharkiv.
It came as part of Vladimir Putin ’s ongoing assault on the east of Ukraine that has marked a second phase of the war.
In the most recent strike, the terrifying video shows people going about their day around the cultural centre.
Two cars are driving past as a cyclist overtakes a pedestrian walking at a road side when suddenly the missile hits, obliterating the centre and sending up a massive plume of dust and smoke.
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One car swerves over to the side of the road as the other speeds away and what remains of the building is invisible amongst the smoke.
More smoke and dust continues to billow into the air as other people can be seen fleeing the scene.
Eventually parts of the building begin to be visible as the smoke clears and the damage and destruction can be seen.
It's unclear how many casualties there are.
Further footage shared on Telegram shows more Russian air attacks that have taken place recently.
This includes a Russian Iskander-M strike on a Ukrainian position near Petrovsk, in Kharkiv.
Serhiy Gaidai, the governor of the Luhansk region, said in a social media post early on Saturday that Russia was trying to destroy the city of Sievierodonetsk.
In a video posted on Telegram, he said: “Shelling continues from morning to the evening and also throughout the night”.
In the early hours of this morning air raid sirens could be heard over much of Ukraine, including in the region around the capital Kyiv, and the southern port of Odessa.
After an initial failed push for the capital, Russia withdrew and reorganised its forces to focus on the east of the country.
Last month, Moscow announced its new intention to capture the Luhansk and Donetsk provinces, much of Ukraine’s industrial Donbas region.
Amongst losses suffered elsewhere, Russian forces have successfully been advancing into the Luhansk region.
And recently, in a sign that politicians in Moscow might be ramping up the war effort, they said they would consider letting Russians over 40 and foreigners over 30 join the military.
The last remaining Ukrainian-held territories in the Donbas region are expected to become central in Putin’s ongoing war efforts.
The cities of Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, both in Luhansk, are crucial Ukrainian controlled cities in a pocket that Russia has been trying, and failing, to take since April.
However, amid the ongoing fighting, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said today that the war could only be resolved through “diplomacy”.
His comments come amidst a deadlock in negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow.
Speaking to a Ukrainian TV channel, he said: “The end will be through diplomacy” and he added that the war “will be bloody, there will be fighting, but it will only definitively end through diplomacy”.
Recent weeks have seen Russia forced from the outskirts of Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv.
However, they have re-taken some of the lost ground and combined with the end of fighting in Mariupol this means Russia now controls a large portion of the south and east of Ukraine.
