KHARKIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian shelling pounded a densely populated area in Ukraine’s second-largest city Thursday, killing at least two people and injuring at least 21 with a barrage that struck a mosque, a medical facility and a shopping area, according to officials and witnesses at the scene.

Police in the northeast city of Kharkiv said cluster bombs hit Barabashovo Market. a public bazaar where Associated Press journalists saw a woman crying over her dead husband’s body. Local officials said the shelling also struck a bus stop, a gym and a residential building.

The bombardment came after Russia on Wednesday reiterated its plans to seize territories beyond eastern Ukraine, where the Russian military has spent months trying to conquer Ukraine’s Donbas region, which is south of Kharkiv. Ukrainian officials recently aired their plans to try to recapture Russian-occupied areas near the country’s southern Black Sea coast.

Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said the attacks early Thursday targeted one of the most crowded areas of the city, which had a prewar population of about 1.4 million.

“The Russian army is randomly shelling Kharkiv, peaceful residential areas, civilians are being killed,” Terekhov said. “Be careful!”

The police claim that cluster bombs hit Barabashovo Market could not be independently confirmed. The AP journalists at the scene shortly after the attack reported seeing burned-out cards and a bus pierced by shrapnel.

The Kharkiv region’s governor, Oleh Syniehubov, said four people were in grave condition and a child was among those wounded in the shelling. Russian forces also have shelled wheat fields in the area, setting them on fire, he said.

Elsewhere, Russian forces shelled the southern city of Mykolaiv overnight as well as the eastern cities of Kramatorsk and Kostiantynivka, where two schools were destroyed after a civilian was killed Wednesday, Ukrainian officials said.

As of 8 a.m. Thursday, Russian shelling of cities across Ukraine killed at least five people and wounded at least 17 more in 24 hours, Ukraine’s presidential office reported.

The scattered attacks illustrate broader war aims beyond Russia’s previously declared focus on the Donbas region’s Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, where front line battles mostly unfolded in recent weeks.

When it invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, Russia quickly seized territory but withdrew from the capital region and north after about six weeks to concentrate on seizing Donetsk and Luhansk, which pro-Moscow separatists have partly controlled since 2014.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told state-controlled RT television and the RIA Novosti news agency in an interview published Wednesday that Russia plans to retain control over more territory, including the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions in the south.

Moscow’s current strategy also envisions making gains elsewhere, Lavrov said. His comments indicated the war could flare up rather than wind down in the weeks to come.

With Western countries providing Ukraine with longer-range weapons, Lavrov said Russia’s “geographical tasks will be pushed even further from the current line because we cannot allow the part of Ukraine under control of (Ukrainian President Volodymyr) Zelenskyy or whoever comes to succeed him, to have weapons that will pose a direct threat to our territory and the territories of those republics that have declared their independence.”

Analysts from the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank based in Washington, said they think the current Russian offensive in Donetsk may result in the capture of the cities of Sloviansk or Bakhmut, though Moscow’s troops have have not yet made “meaningful” progress.

The think tank’s latest analysis t also noted that “Russian troops are now struggling to move across relatively sparsely-settled and open terrain. They will encounter terrain much more conducive to the Ukrainian defenders,” the Institute’s most recent analysis said.

The General Staff of Ukraine’s military reported Thursday that Russian forces attempted to storm the Vuhlehirska power station in the Donetsk region, but “Ukrainian defenders made the enemy resort to fleeing.” Ukraine forces also on Wednesday struck a key bridge on the Dnieper River for the second time in as many days, apparently trying to loosen Russia’s grip on the southern Kherson region.

“Russia is prioritizing the capture of critical national infrastructure, such as power plants,” the British Defense Ministry said Thursday. “However, it is probably also attempting to break through at Vuhlehirska, as part of its efforts to regain momentum on the southern pincer of its advance towards the key cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.”

Fighting also persists in the Luhansk region, next to Donetsk, but it has not been fully captured by the Russian military, governor Serhiy Haidai said.

In other developments on Thursday:

— The operator of a major pipeline from Russia to Europe says natural gas has started flowing again after a 10-day shutdown for maintenance. But the gas flow was expected to fall well short of full capacity and the outlook was uncertain. The Nord Stream 1 pipeline to Germany had been closed since July 11 for annual maintenance work. The pipeline is Germany’s main source of Russian gas. German officials had feared that the pipeline might not reopen at all amid growing tensions over Russia’s war in Ukraine. Operator Nord Stream AG said that gas was flowing again Thursday morning and its network data showed gas beginning to arrive.

— Swiss technology, industrial products and robotics company ABB said it is exiting the Russian market over the war in Ukraine and related sanctions. The company previously suspended accepting new orders from Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. The Zurich-based company, which has two production sites and about 750 people in Russia, posted a second quarter hit of $57 million in financial impact due to the situation. The company says Russia accounted for 1%-2% of its annual revenues – which totaled nearly $29 billion last year – before it stopped taking new orders from Russia.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

Russia has come up with a rather novel excuse as to why it’s failing in its bid to defeat Ukraine.

Since despotic President Vladimir Putin ordered his troops onto Ukrainian land in February, he has lost more than 37,000 troops and failed in his attempts to win in just “72 hours”.

And now the Kremlin is looking for random reasons to blame for it.

READ MORE: British spies accused of gifting Chinese and Russian agents secrets with LinkedIn boasts

The last in a long line of reasons is that Ukraine has “superhuman killing machines” created during “secret experiments” in American-run bio-labs.

According to Russian mouthpiece news organisation Kommersant, the claims are being made by two Russia law experts.

Russia has lost around 37,000 troops since the invasion began
(Image: Getty Images)

Konstantin Kosachev, the deputy speaker of Russia’s Federation Council, and Irina Yarovaya, deputy chair of the State Duma, said that they had found evidence during an investigation started earlier this year.

They said: “We see the cruelty and barbarity with which the military personnel of Ukraine behave, the crimes that they commit against the civilian population, those monstrous crimes that they commit against prisoners of war, confirm that this system for the control and creation of a cruel murder machine was implemented under the management of the United States.

“And those performance enhancing drugs that they are still given in order to completely neutralize the last traces of human consciousness and turn them into the most cruel and deadly monsters also confirm this.”

Konstantin Kosachev, the deputy speaker of Russia’s Federation Council, made the strange claim
(Image: Getty Images)

They also claimed that Ukraine was using Hepatitis A to do this, and added that they found evidence of this in the blood of Ukrainian soldiers captured by Russians.

“It is quite possible that this was about testing these drugs on military personnel,” Yarovaya said.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which began in February, has stalled in recent months despite its continued bombardment of civilian areas.

As of yesterday, Russia has so far lost around 36,200 troops – averaging around 300 troop losses every day at the hands of the Ukrainian resistance.

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July 20 (Reuters) – Russia’s military “tasks” in Ukraine now go beyond the eastern Donbas region, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday, as its forces shelled eastern and southern Ukraine.

Lavrov also told state news agency RIA Novosti that Moscow’s objectives will expand still further if the West keeps supplying Kyiv with long-range weapons such as the U.S.-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS).

“That means the geographical tasks will extend still further from the current line,” he said. read more

Lavrov’s comments were the clearest acknowledgment yet that Russia’s war goals have expanded over the five months of war.

The United States, which had said on Tuesday that it saw signs Russia was preparing to formally annex territory it has seized in Ukraine, promised that it would oppose annexation.

“Again, we’ve been clear that annexation by force would be a gross violation of the UN Charter, and we would not allow it to go unchallenged. We would not allow it to go unpunished,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price said at a regular daily briefing on Wednesday.

Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and supports Russian-speaking breakaway entities – the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) – in those provinces, together known as the Donbas.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Russia rejected diplomacy and wanted “blood, not talks”.

In Washington, the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley said the Donbas region had not yet been lost to the Russians. Ukrainian forces withdrew from Luhansk earlier this month.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told a meeting of allies that the United States will send four more HIMARS to Ukraine. read more

SHELLING

The Ukrainian military reported heavy and sometimes fatal Russian shelling amid what they said were largely failed attempts by Russian ground forces to advance.

The Russian-installed administration in the partially occupied Ukrainian region of Zaporizhzhia said Ukraine had conducted a drone strike on a nuclear power station there, but the reactor was undamaged. read more

Reuters could not independently verify the report. Ukrainian officials had no immediate comment.

Lavrov is the most senior figure to speak openly of Russia’s war goals in territorial terms, nearly five months after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Feb. 24 invasion with a denial that Russia intended to occupy its neighbour.

Then, Putin said his aim was to demilitarise and “denazify” Ukraine – a statement dismissed by Kyiv and the West as a pretext for an imperial-style war of expansion.

Lavrov told RIA Novosti geographical realities had changed since Russian and Ukrainian negotiators held peace talks in Turkey in late March that failed to produce any breakthrough.

“Now the geography is different, it’s far from being just the DPR and LPR, it’s also Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions and a number of other territories,” he said, referring to territories well beyond the Donbas that Russian forces have wholly or partly seized.

ENERGY ‘BLACKMAIL’

Meanwhile, concern that Russian supplies of gas sent through the biggest pipeline in Europe could be stopped by Moscow prompted the European Union to tell member states to cut gas usage by 15% until March as an emergency step. read more

“Russia is blackmailing us. Russia is using energy as a weapon,” EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said, describing a full cut-off of Russian gas flows as “a likely scenario” for which “Europe needs to be ready”.

Putin had earlier warned that gas supplies sent to Europe via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which has been closed for 10 days for maintenance, were at risk of being reduced further.

Russia, the world’s largest gas exporter, has denied Western accusations of using its energy supplies as a tool of coercion, saying it has been a reliable energy supplier.

As for its oil, Russia will not send supplies to the world market if a price cap is imposed below the cost of production, Interfax news agency quoted Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak as saying on Wednesday. read more

EU diplomats meeting in Brussels agreed a new round of sanctions against Moscow, including a ban on importing gold from Russia and freezing the assets of top lender Sberbank. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy dismissed the sanctions as inadequate.

“Russia must feel a much higher price for the war to force it to seek peace,” Zelenskiy said in a late-night video address.

Russia’s invasion has killed thousands, displaced millions and flattened cities, particularly in Russian-speaking areas in the east and southeast of Ukraine. It has also raised global energy and food prices and increased fears of famine in poorer countries as Ukraine and Russia are both major grain producers.

(This story corrects to say Russia will not supply oil to world market ‘if a price cap is imposed below the cost of production’ instead of ‘if price cap is imposed’, in paragraph 22)

Reporting by Reuters bureaux; Writing by Andrew Osborn, Catherine Evans and Grant McCool, Editing by William Maclean, Toby Chopra and Cynthia Osterman

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Russian President Vladimir Putin could be facing another war front, this time on his own turf, as one Chechen battalion prepares a second offensive against Moscow, a spokesman for the volunteer fighting force in Ukraine said.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, volunteer Chechen forces joined the fight in support of Kyiv — fueling the flames to a long-held animus towards not only Russia, but Putin. 

“We know the enemy’s positions, where Russian military bases are,” Islam Belokiev, spokesman for the Sheikh Mansur Battalion, said in a video message obtained by Fox News Digital this week while announcing a plan to once again fight for Chechen independence. “We have divided the Chechen Republic of Icheriya into three fronts and 16 sectors.”

BIDEN ADMIN TO PROVIDE ADDITIONAL WEAPONS, SECURITY ASSISTANCE TO UKRAINE AS RUSSIA PLANS TO ANNEX TERRITORIES

Chechen resistance to Russian rule dates back centuries, and calls for independence began more than 30 years ago following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. 

Broad autonomy was granted under a peace treaty signed by then Russian President Boris Yeltsin after a brutal war devastated the republic from 1994-1996. 

However, disdain for Putin and a decade of war broke out after he voided the treaty and launched a deadly military campaign in 1999 following his appointment as prime minister by Yeltsin.

In an infamous speech that was a prelude to his presidential rise, Putin said, “We will pursue the terrorists everywhere. If we catch them on the toilet, we will wipe them out in the outhouse.”

An estimated 160,000 people were killed in both campaigns, though exact figures remain unclear.

At least two volunteer Chechen battalions, including veteran soldiers from both the first and second Chechen wars, have taken up arms against Russia in Ukraine, including the Sheikh Mansur Battalion and the Dzhokhar Dudayev Battalion.

Both groups have been vocal in denouncing the leader of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, who was appointed to the post in 2007 by Putin and has brutally backed his war efforts against Kyiv.

RUSSIA’S NEED FOR TROOP ‘DISPOSAL’ BEHIND PUSH TO BRING BELARUS INTO WAR, UKRAINIAN OFFICIAL WARNS

A spokesman for the Sheikh Mansur Battalion said the resistance group had divided Chechnya into three sectors and claimed to have begun working with local populations “to uncover the enemy troop movements, type of transport, type of armaments, number of troops and quantity of weapons.”

Fox News could not independently verify the claims, but Rebekah Koffler, a Russia expert and former intelligence officer in Russian doctrine and strategy for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), said it could serve as a strategy to distract Putin’s war effort in Ukraine. 

“The possibility of them taking advantage of Putin’s forces being tied up in Ukraine to assert their independence is very plausible,” she explained. 

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It is unclear if the Chechen volunteer forces are strategizing with Kyiv by creating a second front, but Koffler noted that even if a second front is not fully launched in Chechnya, it could still strain Putin’s forces.

It would “at least make Putin and the Russians believe that they will have to divert their attention and take eyes off Ukraine, so Ukrainians could launch a counter-offensive,” she said. “That’s very clever.”

There has been increasing unconfirmed media speculation that Mr Putin, who turns 70 this year, may be suffering from ill health, possibly cancer.