Five people including three-month-old baby are killed as Putin blitzes Odessa

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Shocking footage shows the moment a Russian missile struck an apartment block in Odessa today with at least five people killed including a three-month-old baby. 

President Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak revealed the deaths on the messaging service Telegram and said 18 others were wounded in the attacks, which come on the eve of Orthodox Easter. 

A block of flats was among the buildings hit in the strike and officials reported that Russia fired at least six cruise missiles. More footage shows black smoke billowing into the sky shortly after the apartment buildings were hit by the missiles.  

Yermak wrote of the Russian attack: ‘These are only those who were found. And most likely, there will be more. A child who had to celebrate his first Easter with his parents. Nothing is sacred. Evil will be punished.’

Many Ukrainians celebrate Easter according to the Julian calendar, with Easter Sunday falling this year on April 24. 

Anton Gerashchenko, an advisor to Ukraine’s interior minister, said: ‘Residents of the city heard explosions in different areas. 

‘Residential buildings were hit. It is already known about one victim. He burned in his car in a courtyard of one of the buildings.’

It comes as Russia resumed its assault on the last Ukrainian defenders holed up in a giant steel works in Mariupol, a Ukrainian official said, days after Moscow declared victory in the southern port city and said its forces did not need to take the factory. 

‘The enemy is trying to strangle the final resistance of the defenders of Mariupol in the Azovstal area,’ Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said on national television. 

The fate of the Ukrainians holed up in the sprawling seaside steel mill wasn’t immediately clear; earlier Saturday, a Ukrainian military unit released a video reportedly taken two days earlier in which women and children holed up underground, some for as long as two months, said they longed to see the sun.

‘We want to see peaceful skies, we want to breathe in fresh air,’ one woman in the video said. ‘You have simply no idea what it means for us to simply eat, drink some sweetened tea. For us, it is already happiness.’

The complex was the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance in the port city but Putin has ordered his forces to completely block it off, ‘so even a fly cannot escape’.

Soldiers and civilians trapped inside have no food or water and Ukraine’s foreign ministry is desperately appealing for an evacuation route to get them to safety.

However, a new attempt to evacuate Ukrainian civilians from the war-torn city failed on Saturday, an aide to the city’s mayor said, blaming Russian forces. The official said 200 residents of Mariupol had gathered to be evacuated, but that the Russian military told them to disperse and warned of possible shelling. 

As the battle for shattered Mariupol ground on, Russia claimed it had taken control of several villages elsewhere in the eastern Donbas region and destroyed 11 military Ukrainian military targets overnight, including three artillery warehouses.

New satellite photos have revealed a second mass grave near Mariupol – as Russian forces continue to pummel the last 2,000 Ukrainian defenders trapped in a steelworks in the city.  

The latest photos from Maxar Technologies showed the site at a cemetery in the town of Vynohradne. It has several newly dug parallel trenches measuring about 131 feet long, Maxar said in a statement.

On Thursday, Maxar released photos of what appeared to be rows upon rows of more than 200 freshly dug mass graves next to a cemetery in the town of Manhush, outside Mariupol. That prompted Ukrainian accusations that the Russians are trying to conceal the slaughter of civilians in the city.

‘This confirms again that the occupiers arrange the collection, burial and cremation of dead residents in every district of the city,’ Andryushchenko said on the Telegram messaging app.

The Ukrainians estimated that the graves seen in the photos released Thursday could hold 9,000 bodies. The Kremlin did not respond to the satellite pictures.

Russia still has not established air or sea control due to Ukrainian resistance, and despite President Vladimir Putin’s declaration of victory in Mariupol, ‘heavy fighting continues to take place, frustrating Russian attempts to capture the city, thus further slowing their desired progress in the Donbas,’ the Ministry of Defense said.

Russia has pulled a dozen crack military units from Mariupol to bolster the offensive elsewhere in the Donbas, while other troops continue to keep the remaining Ukrainian troops in the city pinned in the Azovstal steelworks, the last remaining stronghold, Ukrainian officials said.

‘Every day they drop several bombs on Azovstal,’ said Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to Mariupol’s mayor. ‘Fighting, shelling, bombing do not stop.’

Mariupol has been reduced largely to smoking rubble by weeks of bombardment, and Russian state TV showed the flag of the pro-Moscow Donetsk separatists raised on what it said was the city’s highest point, its TV tower. It also showed what it said was the main building at Azovstal steel plant in flames.

Under cover of darkness, Ukrainian forces have managed to deliver weapons to the besieged steelworks via helicopter, said Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council.

Overall, the Kremlin has thrown more than 100,000 troops and mercenaries from Syria and Libya into the fight in Ukraine and is deploying more forces in the country every day, Danilov said.

‘We have a difficult situation, but our army is defending our state,’ he said.

Mariupol has taken on outsize importance in the war. Capturing it would deprive the Ukrainians of a vital port and complete a land corridor between Russia and the Crimean Peninsula, which Putin seized from Ukraine in 2014.

It would also allow Putin to throw more of his forces into the potentially climactic battle for the Donbas and its coal mines, factories and other industries, or what the Kremlin has now declared to be its main objective.

More than 100,000 people – down from a prewar population of about 430,000 – are believed trapped in Mariupol with little food, water or heat, and over 20,000 civilians have been killed in the nearly two-month siege, according to Ukrainian authorities.

Most attempts to evacuate civilians from the city have failed because of what the Ukrainians said was continued Russian shelling.

Russia’s defence ministry earlier said on Saturday that its forces had shot down a Ukrainian Su-25 fighter jet and destroyed three MI-8 helicopters at an airfield in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region.

There was no immediate reaction from Ukraine regarding the Russian claims.

However, Kharkiv regional governor Oleh Synehubov says two people were killed and 19 more wounded by Russian shelling in the area.

Synehubov said on the messaging app Telegram on Saturday that over the past day Russian forces fired at the region’s civilian infrastructure 56 times. Kharkiv, which is near the front lines, has faced repeated shelling from Russian forces. 

It comes as all the Ukrainian-controlled cities in the eastern region of Luhansk were constantly being shelled by Russian forces on Saturday, with the barrage intensifying, the region’s governor Serhiy Haidai said on television.

He said Ukrainian forces were leaving some settlements there in order to regroup, but that the move did not amount to a critical setback.

Russia denies targeting civilian areas but Haidai said Saturday that two people were killed by Russian shelling in the city of Popasna.

He said an evacuation train for residents of the Donetsk and Luhansk areas was expected to leave Saturday from the eastern city of Pokrovsk bound for the western city of Chop, near Ukraine’s border with Slovakia and Hungary.

‘In addition to the fact that street fighting continues in the city for several weeks, the Russian army constantly fires at multistory residential buildings and private houses,’ Haidai wrote on the messaging app Instagram. ‘Just yesterday, local residents withstood five enemy artillery attacks… not all survived.’

Russian troops are also pressing their offensive in the eastern Donbas region in an attempt to fully seize Ukraine’s industrial heartland but have made little headway as fierce Ukrainian counterattacks have slowed their efforts, Ukrainian and British officials said Saturday.

Russia continues to fight for full control of the Donetsk and Luhansk areas that make up the Donbas and seeks to secure ‘a land route between these territories and the occupied Crimea,’ including by wiping out the last pocket of resistance in the besieged port city of Mariupol, Ukraine’s General Staff said.

Ukrainian forces over the past 24 hours repelled eight Russian attacks in the two regions, destroying nine tanks, 18 armored units and 13 vehicles, a tanker and three artillery systems, the General Staff said.

‘Units of Russian occupiers are regrouping. Russian enemy continues to launch missile and bomb strikes on military and civilian infrastructure,’ the General Staff said on its Facebook page.

Britain’s Ministry of Defense said despite their increased activity ‘Russian forces have made no major gains in the last 24 hours as Ukrainian counter-attacks continue to hinder the efforts.’