At least 17 people were killed in strikes on a town in central Ukraine on Thursday, as the European Union and the International Criminal Court (ICC) are set to raise war crimes charges in the Netherlands. Russian army.

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According to the Ukrainian emergency services, the shelling hit a parking lot adjoining a commercial building in the center of Vinnytsia, an important railway hub in the center-west of the country. The images published by the emergency services show a building of about ten floors gutted and burned, dozens of carcasses of charred cars.

According to the Ukrainian prosecutor's office, "17 people died, including two children" and several dozen were injured.

“Every day Russia kills civilians, kills Ukrainian children, fires missiles at civilian targets where there is nothing military. What is it, if not an open act of terrorism?” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday on Telegram after the announcement of the shootings at Vinnytsia.

At the same time, political, diplomatic and judicial leaders from around the world, including European foreign and justice ministers, were preparing to meet in The Hague on Thursday for a conference on accountability for crimes committed in Ukraine since February 24.

Mr. Zelensky is to make a statement there by videoconference and his head of diplomacy Dmytro Kouleba will be present.

The International Criminal Court in The Hague opened in early March, a few days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an investigation into the situation in the country and dispatched dozens of investigators there to collect evidence of possible crimes of war.

His prosecutor, Karim Khan, went to Boutcha in April, a town near Kyiv that has become the symbol of the atrocities of this war, where AFP journalists had discovered the bodies of 20 civilians in a street and where According to Ukrainian officials, hundreds more people were killed.

Strikes on the south

For several weeks, Russian strikes on western and central Ukraine, away from the eastern and southern front lines, have been relatively rare.

But the war is now spreading and raging around cities like the port of Mykolaiv, near the Black Sea and a key lock on the road to Odessa (southwest), which was hit by a “massive strike from missiles” early Thursday morning, for the second consecutive day.

“Two schools, transport infrastructure and a hotel were damaged,” the presidency said in its daily morning briefing.

Footage released by local authorities shows the remains of a building destroyed by bombardment, with municipal workers cleaning up debris strewn from the attack.

Kyiv for its part launched a counter-offensive several weeks ago to retake Kherson, located about sixty kilometers from Mykolaiv and the only regional capital captured by Moscow since February 24.

While the front line remains relatively stable, Ukraine is staging increasingly powerful attacks with new US and European rocket systems targeting arms depots.

"Total Victory"

The main battles, however, remain focused on eastern Ukraine and the Donbass, an industrial and mining basin that Moscow has promised to completely conquer.

According to the governor of the Lugansk region, Sergiï Gaïdaï, "massive artillery and mortar attacks continue (and) the Russians are trying to break through towards Siversk and open the way towards Bakhmout", where a civilian died in bombings in the night from Wednesday to Thursday.

The pro-Russian separatists supported by Moscow claim for their part to be close to winning another victory there, a few days after taking several important cities.

"Siversk is under our operational control, which means that the enemy can be hit by our fire in the whole area," said a separatist official, Daniïl Bezsonov, quoted by the Russian news agency TASS.

AFP was unable to independently confirm this information.

A little further north, in the region of Izioum, "we dig when it's calm, we hide when it's shooting", confided to AFP a soldier in labyrinthine trenches several tens of meters long built by the Ukrainian army, to the sound of artillery fire.

One of its officers, however, declared that "the situation is under control", affirming in this zone that the Russian army is no longer advancing and that the objective is "total victory".

Cereal Discussions

On Wednesday, during a meeting of military experts in Istanbul, Russia and Ukraine also made progress on the thorny issue of blocking grain exports from Ukrainian ports.

"Really substantial progress" has been made, commented UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who said he hoped a "formal agreement" could be reached soon and spoke of "a ray of hope to alleviate the suffering humanity and hunger in the world”.

The agreement negotiated by Antonio Guterres for more than two months aims not only to bring out through the Black Sea some 20 million tonnes of grain blocked in Ukrainian silos, in particular in Odessa, but also to facilitate Russian exports of grain and fertilizer.

Ukraine is one of the world's leading exporters of wheat and other grains and time is running out as global food price hikes pose famine risks, especially in Africa.