The regional government headquarters of Mykolaiv, Ukraine, following a Russian attack, on Tuesday, March 29, 2022. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says seven people were killed in a missile strike on the regional government headquarters in the southern city of Mykolayiv. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)
Kyiv, March 30 (AP): Ukraine's state agency for emergencies says that the death toll in a Russian strike on the regional administration building in the southern city of Mykolaiv has risen to 14.
Ukrainian authorities say Russian forces blasted a gaping hole in a nine-story government building in a strike on Tuesday morning. The regional governor has charged that they waited for people to go to work before striking it.
The emergencies agency said Wednesday that rescuers removed one more body from the rubble and another person died of wounds at a hospital, bringing the death toll to 14.
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Kyiv: An adviser to Ukraine's president says that the Russian military has redeployed some of its forces to the east of the country.
Oleksiy Arestovych said in televised remarks Wednesday that Russia has moved some of its troops from areas near Kyiv to the east in an effort to encircle the Ukrainian forces there.
He said Russia has left some of its forces near Kyiv to tie up Ukrainian troops there and prevent them moving to other areas. Arestovych said Russia hasn't yet pulled back any of its troops from the northern city of Chernihiv.
Russian military officials have said they will focus their efforts on eastern Ukraine, where Moscow-backed rebels have been fighting Ukrainian forces since 2014. Russia also announced after talks Tuesday with Ukrainian negotiators in Istanbul that it will scale down its activities around Kyiv and Chernihiv to help the talks succeed.
Chernihiv governor Viacheslav Chaus said that Russian strikes against civilian infrastructure continued overnight despite the Russian claim.
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Moscow: The Russian military has reported a new series of strikes on Ukrainian arsenals and fuel depots.
Russian Defence Ministry spokesman Maj Gen Igor Konashenkov said Wednesday that the military used air-launched long-range cruise missiles to target a fuel depot in Starokostiantyniv and Khmelnytskyi in central Ukraine.
Konashenkov said in a statement that the Russian forces also hit the Ukrainian special forces headquarters in Bereznehuvate in the southern Mykolaiv region.
Konashenkov also said the Russian military used mobile land-based Iskander missile launchers to hit two ammunition depots in the eastern Donetsk region. The Russian military said it has shifted focus to Ukraine's eastern industrial heartland of Donbas, where Moscow-backed rebels have been battling Ukrainian forces since 2014.
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Lviv: A spokesman for the World Food Programme says it welcomes talk of a possible pullback of Russian forces in parts of Ukraine but the process of negotiating aid access has not improved.
Tomson Phiri told The Associated Press on Wednesday that we expect faster clearances, faster guarantees of access". He spoke after a WFP convoy reached the hard-hit city of Kharkiv with supplies for bakeries and emergency food rations.
People had gone for days without finding food, he said. These are people who've never experienced hunger in their lives.
He says WFP has already reached 1 million people with assistance. The goal is to reach 4 million in the coming months.
Mariupol is top of mind, he said, as well as Sumy and other partly encircled areas. (AP)
