Ukraine: Woman pulled alive from rubble after Russian shelling in Luhansk as civilians told to flee

A woman has been pulled alive from the rubble of a home in Rubizhne after a Russian airstrike which killed a civilian, as Putin‘s forces continue to pound the east of Ukraine.

Emergency services shared photos this morning of the distressed woman buried under timber and rocks as they scrambled to free her following the latest savage attack.

Once she was pulled to safety yesterday afternoon, the woman was carried by rescuers to an ambulance and she is being treated at hospital.

The airstrike injured five people and seven more ‘extricated themselves from the rubble’, the local governor Sergiy Gaiday said. 

It comes as shells and rockets are landing regularly in the industrial city of Severodonetsk, the easternmost city held by Ukrainian forces on the eastern frontline, as Putin refocuses his brutal campaign in the Donbas after suffering major losses further west.

In Mariupol, the city council have accused Russians of setting up mobile crematoriums to remove any evidence of potential war crimes.

Officials estimate the death toll in the port city is as high as tens of thousands, and the Kremlin is now trying to ‘cover their tracks’ after the international condemnation to the horrific scenes of Bucha where civilian bodies were piled high and buried in mass graves, they said.

The city council said: ‘After the widespread international genocide in Bucha, Russia’s top leadership ordered the destruction of any evidence of crimes committed by its army in Mariupol.

‘All potential witnesses to the occupiers’ atrocities are being identified through filtration camps and destroyed.’  

Meanwhile in Luhansk, residents have been ordered to evacuate today as a strike on a humanitarian aid distribution centre killed two and injured five.

Donetsk Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko shared online photos from the town of Vuhledar, where he said Russian artillery fire had struck a humanitarian aid distribution point. 

The photos showed two women stretched out on the ground. Another person had a serious leg wound and a fourth was shown with a bloodied leg, being helped into a rescue vehicle.

‘At the moment it’s known that two people were killed and five were injured. We document all the crimes committed by the Russian Federation on our land,’ Kyrylenko wrote.

Authorities in the eastern region urged residents to get out ‘while it is safe’ from an area that Ukraine expects to be the target of a major new offensive. 

The Luhansk region governor, Serhiy Gaidai, said Russian forces now controlled 60 per cent of the eastern town of Rubizhne and reported 81 mortar, artillery and rocket strikes across the region over the previous day.

‘I appeal to every resident of the Luhansk region – evacuate while it is safe,’ he wrote in an online post earlier on Wednesday. ‘While there are buses and trains – take this opportunity.’

To the south, the besieged southern port of Mariupol has been under bombardment throughout most of the invasion that began on February 24, trapping tens of thousands of residents without food, water or power.

The crucial port city remains surrounded and under siege from Russian forces amid constant shelling. 

Mariupol’s capture could enable Russia to entrench a land passage between two separatist, self-proclaimed people’s republics in Donbas and the Crimea region which Russia seized and annexed in 2014. 

‘The humanitarian situation in the city is worsening,’ British military intelligence said on Wednesday, while Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said people trying to flee would have to use their own vehicles. 

Russian forces overnight struck a fuel depot and a factory in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, and the number of casualties remains unclear, the region’s Governor Valentyn Reznichenko said.

‘The night was alarming and difficult. The enemy attacked our area from the air and hit the oil depot and one of the plants. The oil depot with fuel was destroyed. Rescuers are still putting out the flames at the plant. There is a strong fire,’ Reznichenko wrote.

New drone footage has also revealed the scale of destruction in Borodyanka, a liberated town near Bucha, which Zelensky said could reveal more horrors of the Russian occupation.

Russian forces last week pulled back from positions outside Kyiv and shifted the focus of their assault away from the capital, and Ukraine’s general staff said the northeastern city of Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest, also remained under attack.   

Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said Ukraine was trying to evacuate trapped civilians through 11 humanitarian corridors across Ukraine, but that people trying to flee Mariupol would have to use their own vehicles.

The city mayor said last week up to 170,000 civilians were trapped in Mariupol with no power and dwindling supplies. 

Western sanctions over Russia’s invasion gained new impetus this week when dead civilians shot at close range were found in the town of Bucha after it was retaken from Russian forces.

As Pope Francis described the killings there as a ‘massacre’, the head of the European Commission signalled further sanctions – including examining a ban on energy imports – on top of ones unveiled by the bloc on Tuesday. Washington is in turn due to announce new sanctions on Wednesday. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the West needed to act decisively in taking ‘more rigid’ steps.

‘When we are hearing new rhetoric about sanctions… I can’t tolerate any indecisiveness after everything that Russian troops have done,’ he told Irish lawmakers by videolink.

Ukrainian officials say between 150 and 300 bodies might be in a mass grave by a church in Bucha, north of the capital Kyiv, where satellite images taken weeks ago show bodies of civilians on a street, a private U.S. company said. 

Moscow, which refers to the conflict as a ‘special military operation’ designed to demilitarise Ukraine, denied targeting civilians there and called the evidence presented a forgery staged by the West to discredit it.

Reuters could not immediately verify the British report.

Vereshchuk said authorities would try to evacuate civilians trapped elsewhere through 11 humanitarian corridors. 

Ukraine’s foreign minister said that while he welcomed the latest set of EU sanctions only an embargo on Russian gas and oil and cutting off all Russian banks from the global financial system could ‘stop’ President Vladimir Putin.

‘I will take a gas/oil embargo and de-SWIFTing of all Russian banks to stop Putin. Difficult times require difficult decisions,’ Dmytro Kuleba said on Twitter.

Speaking a day after the European Union announced new sanctions, including a ban on Russian coal imports and denying Russian ships access to EU ports, the head of the EU executive, Ursula von der Leyen, said there was more to come.

‘These sanctions will not be our last sanctions,’ she told European Parliament on Wednesday. ‘Now we have to look into oil and revenues Russia gets from fossil fuels.’ 

Von der Leyen’s remarks signalled the bloc’s strengthening resolve to take the step that Kyiv says is vital to securing a deal to end the war. But German Finance Minster Christian Lindner said in a newspaper interview, Europe’s biggest economy which relies on Russian gas for much of its energy needs, was just not ready for an immediate ban. 

The White House said earlier that new sanctions, coordinated between Washington, the Group of Seven advanced economies and the EU, will target Russian banks and officials and ban new investment in Russia.