At least 25 killed in Russian shelling as Putin set to annex Ukrainian regions

An attack on a humanitarian convoy has left at least 25 people dead and 50 injured in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia, just hours before Vladimir Putin was set to formally announce the annexation of four regions in Ukraine.

One of those regions is Zaporizhzhia, but not the city itself where the attack took place, which remains in Ukrainian hands.

Ukraine’s general prosecutor’s office said Russia shelling left deep craters and sent shrapnel tearing through the humanitarian convoy’s vehicles, killing their passengers. Nearby buildings were demolished. Trash bags, blankets and, for one victim, a blood-soaked towel, were used to cover bodies.

Russian-installed officials in Zaporizhzhia blamed Ukrainian forces for the strike, but provided no evidence.

Putin is expected to speak at a ceremony in Red Square ceremony in Moscow later on Friday to declare Russia has absorbed areas of eastern and southern Ukraine.

As well as Zaporizhzhia, the Russian president will declare Donetsk, Luhansk and Kherson as part of Russia, even though it does not control all of the areas.

The Kremlin repeated on Friday that attacks against any part of the annexed regions would be considered aggression against Russia itself, adding Moscow would fight to take the whole of the Donbas region.

The West has vowed that it will never recognise Russian annexation.

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky also remained defiant as chunks of his country were expected to be absorbed into Russia.

He called an emergency meeting of his National Security and Defence Council and denounced the latest barrage of Russian strikes.

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“The enemy rages and seeks revenge for our steadfastness and his failures,” he posted on his Telegram channel. “You will definitely answer. For every lost Ukrainian life!”

But even at Russia’s moment of celebration, the Kremlin was facing another battlefield loss, its latest in several weeks. Russian and western analysts reported the imminent Ukrainian encirclement of the city of Lyman, which could open the path for Ukraine to push deep into one of the regions Russia is annexing.

The head of the Russian-backed separatist administration in east Ukraine’s Donetsk region said on Friday that the Russian stronghold of Lyman, in the region’s north, was “semi-encircled” by the Ukrainian army and that news from the front was “alarming”.

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In a message posted on Telegram, Denis Pushilin, administrator of the self-styled Donetsk People’s Republic, said the villages of Yampil and Drobysheve near Lyman “are no longer fully controlled by us”.

Pushilin said that “the Ukrainian army is trying with all its might to blacken this historic event for us”.

Lyman, which had a pre-war population of around 20,000, was captured by Russia in May after an extended battle. It has been at the centre of renewed fighting since Ukraine routed Russian forces in the nearby Kharkiv region in a lightning counteroffensive this month.

It is some 160 kilometres (100 miles) southeast of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city.

Meanwhile, Ukraine is also keeping close watch of its Russia-allied neighbour to the north, Belarus, which the Kremlin used as a staging ground for its ultimately defeated initial attempt to Kyiv in the opening stage of the invasion.

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The ongoing development of airfields, barracks and warehouses at two Belorussian military bases suggests that Russia may again try to use the country as a launch pad to open another front in the war, said Oleksii Hromov, a senior commander in the Ukrainian armed forces’ General Staff.