Latest developments:
- Members of the Russian Wagner mercenary group who relocated to Belarus, and are training the army there, are keen to push across the border into NATO member Poland, joked Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. "The Wagner guys have started to stress us — they want to go west. 'Let's go on a trip to Warsaw and Rzeszow,'" he was quoted as saying. There was no indication that Lukashenko was seriously entertaining that idea.
- A previously announced meeting of a new NATO-Ukraine Council, expected to address Black Sea security, has been scheduled for Wednesday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin said Ukraine's counteroffensive "has failed" as he hosted Belarusian leader Lukashenko, his close ally, for talks in St. Petersburg.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy decried the Russian attacks on the city of Odesa and in particular its historic center, one of UNESCO’s world heritage sites.
“The target of all these missiles is not just cities, villages or people. Their target is humanity and the foundations of our entire European culture,” Zelenskyy said Sunday in his nightly video address. “Last night, a Russian missile — it was an X-22, an anti-ship missile — hit the altar of the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral in Odesa. ... One of the most valuable cathedrals in Ukraine.”
Russian airstrikes damaged the historic Transfiguration Cathedral in Odesa early Sunday, prompting Kyiv to pledge retaliation for the damage to the UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Father Myroslav, the assistant rector of the cathedral, said there was extensive damage inside.
“There was a direct hit to the cathedral; it completely damaged three altars,” he said.
Members of the clergy pulled icons from the rubble inside the cathedral. Mosaics were smashed. A security guard and clergymen were inside when the strike hit, but they survived.
The destruction of the historic monument has caused outrage.
Zelenskyy has vowed to retaliate, saying, “They [Russia] will definitely feel this,” he said. He also pledged to restore the historic church.
UNESCO issued a statement “strongly” condemning the attack. European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell condemned the strike as a “new war crime.”
The first and foremost church in the city of Odesa was founded in 1794 during the Russian empire. It was demolished under Stalin in 1936. Its rebuilding commenced in 1999 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and it was consecrated in 2003.
Separately, “a preliminary assessment in Odesa has revealed damage to several museums inside the World Heritage property, including the Odesa Archaeological Museum, the Odesa Maritime Museum and the Odesa Literature Museum. They had all been marked by UNESCO and local authorities with the Blue Shield, the distinctive emblem of the 1954 Hague Convention,” the UNESCO statement said.
Russia's defense ministry claimed it struck areas that were suspected of being sites of terrorist acts but denied it had struck the cathedral and said the building had probably been hit by a Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile.
The airstrikes killed two people and wounded at least 19 others, including children.
Residents said the missiles hit only residential areas and small businesses.
Russia has launched a series of attacks on Odesa since Moscow’s exit from a U.N.-brokered Black Sea grain deal that was securing the safe passage of cargo ships through the Black Sea corridor.
Ukraine counteroffensive
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN Sunday that while Ukraine’s counteroffensive is going more slowly than originally hoped for, Ukrainian forces had reconquered half the territory that Russia had initially occupied when it invaded.
"It’s already taken back about 50% of what was initially seized," Blinken said. "These are still relatively early days of the counteroffensive. It is tough.”
"It will not play out over the next week or two. We’re still looking I think at several months," he said, as Ukrainian troops struggled to breach heavily entrenched Russian positions in the country's south and east.
Blinken remarked that Russia has failed as far as what it was aiming to achieve when it invaded Ukraine.
“The objective was to erase Ukraine from the map, to eliminate its independence, its sovereignty, to subsume it into Russia. That failed a long time ago. Now Ukraine is in a battle to get back more of the land that Russia seized from it,” Blinken said.
Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Ukraine’s counteroffensive “has failed."
While visiting St. Petersburg, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, a key Putin ally, said Sunday, "There is no counteroffensive.”
Putin replied: "It exists, but it has failed."
Some information in this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
