Russian strikes hit military base outside Kyiv. Kharkiv, Chernihiv also attacked

1. A senior Ukraine military official has said Moscow’s forces have struck a military base north of the capital, Kyiv, in a rare admission of a successful Russian attack on Ukrainian military infrastructure.

Oleksiy Gromov told reporters that Russian forces had fired “six Kalibr cruise missiles on a military base in Lyutizh” at around 02:00 GMT from the Crimea peninsula. One building was destroyed and two were damaged in the attack on the town some 30 kilometres (19 miles) north of the capital.

Gromov also reported attacks on Ukraine’s northern region of Chernihiv, with shells fired from neighbouring Belarus, an ally of Moscow. He added there were “losses” among Ukrainian troops.
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2. Russian forces have launched a missile attack on the Kyiv area for the first time in weeks and pounded the northern Chernihiv region as well, in what Ukraine said was revenge for standing up to the Kremlin.

Ukrainian officials, meanwhile, announced a counteroffensive to take back the occupied Kherson region in the country’s south.

Russia attacked the Kyiv region with six missiles launched from the Black Sea, hitting a military unit in the village of Liutizh on the outskirts of the capital, according to Oleksii Hromov, a senior official with Ukraine’s General Staff.

He said that the attack ruined one building and damaged two others, and that Ukrainian forces also shot down one of the missiles in the town of Bucha.

Fifteen people were wounded in the Russian attacks, five of them "civilians", Kyiv regional governor Oleksiy Kuleba said.

Chernihiv regional governor Vyacheslav Chaus reported that the Russians also fired missiles from the territory of Belarus at the village of Honcharivska. The Chernihiv region had not been targeted in weeks.

Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, also came under a barrage of shelling overnight, according to the mayor. Authorities said a police officer was killed in Russian shelling of a power plant in the Kharkiv region.

The southern city of Mykolaiv was fired on as well, with one person reported injured.

The renewed attacks come a day after the leader of pro-Kremlin separatists in the east, Denis Pushilin, urged Russian forces to “liberate Russian cities founded by the Russian people – Kyiv, Chernihiv, Poltava, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Lutsk.”