Multiple casualties have been reported after Ukrainian officials alleged that a group of bat and pipe-wielding civilians attacked a draft officer.
Officials said the incident took place at 2pm local time in the small village of Buzke in Mykolaiv Oblast.
They said that the civilians, who have not yet been identified, were ‘armed with bats and metal pipes’ and ‘damaged a vehicle and inflicted bodily injuries on a soldier.’
In response to the attack, the soldier is said to have ‘a shot with a non-lethal ammunition device.’
The attack left an unspecified number of Ukrainian soldiers and police, as well as civilians injured.
Cops are now investigating the incident, and warned dissidents that insulting the ‘honour and dignity’ of soldiers, as well as threatening violence against them, was punishable by up to five years in prison.
It added that bringing harm to soldiers could result in up to 12 years imprisonment.
From the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Zelensky faced an uphill battle with his countrymen, who resisted the enforced conscription into the country’s military.
Just two days ago protesters in the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia broke into a stadium where roughly 100 men were being held by military enlistment officers.
Cops arrested several demonstrators.
It comes as a Ukrainian drone attack sparked a fire at an oil depot in Sochi, the Russian resort that hosted the 2014 Winter Olympic which is 250 miles from the Ukrainian border, authorities said Sunday.
Ukraine has regularly hit Russian oil and gas infrastructure in response to attacks on its own territory since Russia began its offensive in February 2022.
‘Sochi suffered a drone attack by the Kyiv regime last night,’ the governor of Russia’s Krasnodar region, Veniamin Kondratiev, said on Telegram.
He said drone wreckage hit an ‘oil tank, which caused a fire’ during the night-time attack.
Sochi’s mayor, Andrei Proshunin, said there were no victims and that the fire was put out several hours later.
Images, broadcast by Russian media but whose authenticity AFP could not verify, showed flames and a thick plumes of black smoke rising from the site.
Air traffic was briefly suspended at Sochi airport, Russia’s air transport regulator Rosaviatsia said.
Ukraine authorities have not commented on the fire.
Air strikes on Sochi are relatively rare compared to some other Russian cities.
However, Ukrainian drone attacks killed two people there late last month, according to local authorities.
