Ukraine ports impossible to defend from attack – Odesa chief

The head of Ukraine’s Odesa region has said its three ports are “not possible” to protect fully because they span such a large area and Russia has intensified its missile attacks.

He was speaking to the BBC after a 16-year-old girl, two women and a man were killed in a Russian strike on a two-floor building to the north-west of Odesa city.

It was the fourth such attack on the Black Sea coastal region in five days, and regional head Oleh Kiper said “probably a ballistic missile was targeting an infrastructure facility, but it hit nearby instead – into this place.”

Russia has not commented on its wave of missile strikes. A further nine people were killed in an attack on a cargo ship early on Thursday.

There have been ballistic missile strikes on Odesa’s ports before. But never so many, in quick succession.

Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said Russia had carried out 60 such attacks in just three months, damaging or destroying almost 300 port facilities. He said 79 people had been killed or wounded and 22 civilian vessels hit.

Oleh Kiper told the BBC that Odesa’s current air defences were unable to cover all three ports in Odesa region as they spanned over about 80km (50 miles): “So the main focus is on the city of Odesa, where over a million people live. The rest of the ports and towns remain in a difficult situation.”

Other Ukrainian ports – in the Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Mykolayiv regions – are no longer operating, making the facilities in Odesa more important than ever to Ukrainian exports.

He suggested Russia was attacking civilian vessels now to harm Ukraine’s economy and to scare the world with what it could do.

“They hit [the ships in Odesa] so that the insurance companies and the ship owners refuse to enter our ports, into the combat zone, Kiper said.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s prosecutor-general has said criminal proceedings have begun into the death in Russian detention of a prominent Ukrainian journalist who chronicled life under occupation in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

Viktoriia Roshchyna had been briefly detained in the occupied eastern city of Berdyansk in 2022 but she disappeared in the occupied east in August 2023 and it was not until a few months ago that Russian authorities confirmed she was being held.

Ukrainian intelligence officials said she was supposed to have been included in a prisoner exchange and Russian reports said she died on 19 September while being moved to a detention centre in Moscow.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Roshchyna’s death had come as a heavy blow. “For all of us in Ukraine, the issue of captured and deported people remains incredibly painful. These are adults and children, many civilians who are now held in prisons and camps in Russia,” he wrote on X.

Zelensky met Pope Francis at the Vatican on Friday before heading to Berlin for talks with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

He is promoting a “victory plan” to end the war and told a briefing in Berlin he would like to see the war end “no later than next year, 2025,” adding that it was very important that aid to Kyiv did not decrease in the coming year.

Italy’s Giorgia Meloni had earlier promised Zelensky that support for Kyiv would last “for as long as needed”.

Zelensky denied he had been discussing terms for a ceasefire. “The key is to strengthen Ukraine’s positions and relations with our closest partners,” he stressed.

Russian forces continue to make gains in eastern Ukraine, and on Friday authorities in the strategically important hilltop city of Toretsk said only 40-50% of it remained under Ukrainian control.

Ukrainian troops are outgunned and outnumbered and are also under pressure in the Pokrovsk. The two cities are seen as vital for maintaining the army’s supply lines.

Earlier this week Ukraine’s military targeted a big oil terminal on the east coast of Russian-occupied Crimea.

Satellite images show the offshore facility at Feodosia is still burning five days after the attack. Russian-installed official Igor Tkachenko said that even though the fire was not out, it was fully under control.

The Ukrainian military said the terminal was the biggest in Crimea and helped supply Russia’s occupying forces.

More than 1,000 residents have had to leave their homes because of the strike, which Kyiv says is in retaliation for Russian attacks that have destroyed much of its power infrastructure.