Russia strikes US weapons at airfield near Ukraine’s Odesa, destroys runway: Report

Russia on Sunday said it had struck at weapons supplied to Ukraine by the United States and European countries and destroyed a runway at a military airfield near the Ukrainian city of Odesa, news agency Reuters reported.

The defence ministry said it used high-precision Onyx missiles to strike the airfield, after Ukraine accused Russia of knocking out a newly constructed runway at the main airport of Odesa.

Odesa regional governor Maksym Marchenko said Russia had used a Bastion missile, launched from Crimea.

The defence ministry also said its air defence systems had shot down two Ukrainian Su-24m bombers over the Kharkiv region overnight.

The strike comes even as some women and children have been evacuated from a steel plant that is the last defensive stronghold in the bombed-out ruins of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, while US. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Ukraine’s president in the country’s capital in a show of American support.

Russia’s offensive in coastal southern Ukraine and the country’s eastern industrial heartland has Ukrainian forces fighting village by village and more civilians fleeing airstrikes and artillery shelling as the war reaches their doorsteps, news agency AP reported.

Thousands of residents were believed to remain trapped with little food, water or medicine in blockaded Mariupol, AP reported, adding that the United Nations was working to broker an evacuation of as many as 1,000 civilians who were hunkered down with an estimated 2,000 Ukrainian fighters beneath a sprawling Soviet-era steel plant that is the only part of the city not occupied by the Russians.