KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The death toll from a missile attack on apartment buildings in a southern Ukrainian city rose to 11 as more Russian missiles and — for the first time — explosive-packed drones targeted Ukrainian-held Zaporizhzhia on Friday.
As the war sparked by Russia’s February invasion of its neighbor ground on, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to human rights organizations in Russia and Ukraine, and an activist jailed in Russian ally Belarus.
Asked by a reporter whether the prize shared by Belarus rights activist Ales Bialiatski, the Russian group Memorial and the Ukrainian organization Center for Civil Liberties should be seen as a “birthday gift” to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who turned 70 on Friday, committee chair Berit Reiss-Andersen said no.
“The prize is not addressing President Putin, not for his birthday or in any other sense, except that his government, as the government in Belarus, is representing an authoritarian government that is suppressing human rights activists,” Reiss-Andersen said.
Putin this week illegally claimed four regions of Ukraine as Russian territory, including the Zaporizhzhia region that is home to a sprawling nuclear power plant under Russian occupation; the city of the same name remains under Ukrainian control.
Fighting near the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant has alarmed the U.N.’s atomic energy watchdog. An accident there could release 10 times the amount of potentially lethal radioactivity than the world’s worst nuclear accident did in Chernobyl 36 years ago, Ukrainian Environmental Protection Minister Ruslan Strilets said Friday.
“The situation with the occupation, shelling, and mining of the Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plants by Russian troops is causing consequences that will have a global character,” Strilets told The Associated Press in an email interview while attending a U.N. conference in Cyprus.
With its army losing ground to a Ukrainian counteroffensive in the country’s south and east, Russia has deployed Iranian-made drones to attack Ukrainian targets. The unmanned, disposable “kamikaze drones” are cheaper and less sophisticated than missiles but have proved effective at causing damage to targets on the ground.
The regional governor, Oleksandr Starukh, said Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones damaged two infrastructure facilities in the city of Zaporizhzhia, the first time they were used there. He said missiles also struck the city again, injuring one person.
The Emergency Services of Ukraine said the toll of Russian S-300 missile strikes on the city a day earlier rose to 11 and another 21 people were rescued from the rubble of destroyed apartments