Russian-installed officials flee Ukraine’s Kherson amid heavy fighting in south and east
LA TimesA man examines what remains of his car Thursday after an overnight Russian attack on the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk. Russian-appointed authorities have fled the capital of southern Ukraine’s Kherson region along with tens of thousands of residents as Ukrainian forces pressed their campaign to recapture the city Thursday. Amid the battles, Moscow issued a warning that the U.S. could be drawn into the conflict, adding that Russian forces could target Western commercial satellites used for military purposes in support of Ukraine. The deputy head of Russia’s delegation to a United Nations arms-control panel, Konstantin Vorontsov, described the use of U.S. and other Western commercial satellites for military purposes during the fighting in Ukraine as “extremely dangerous.” “The quasi-civilian infrastructure could be a legitimate target for a retaliatory strike,” Vorontsov warned without elaborating. Gromov also alleged Thursday that Russian forces may have staged explosions at residential buildings in the city of Kherson before retreating from the city “to inflict a critical damage to the infrastructure of the areas being reclaimed by Ukraine.” The war in Ukraine and the resulting energy crisis is likely to cause global demand for fossil fuels to peak or flatten out, according to a report released Thursday by the Paris-based International Energy Agency, largely because of the fall in Russian exports.