KYIV, Ukraine — As Russia’s forces lose ground in Ukraine, they continued to rain destruction and death on Ukrainian civilian targets, using artillery and missiles on Thursday and Friday to strike multiple cities and towns, often far from any combat.
Ukrainian officials and some military analysts say that as the Russian military retreats in the east and the south, it is growing more determined to destroy infrastructure and more indiscriminate about causing civilian casualties, using its advantage in long-range munitions as if to punish Ukraine for Moscow’s losses.
The barrage continued on a day when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to human rights activists in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, an implicit rebuke to Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin, for his invasion of Ukraine.
Overnight nearly 40 Russian rockets hit Nikopol, on the Dnipro River, damaging at least 10 homes, several apartment blocks and other infrastructure, according to the head of the regional military administration, Valentyn Reznichenko. He said that further shelling on Friday evening killed one man and wounded another.
Iranian-made “kamikaze” drones struck the cities of Zaporizhzhia and Mykolaiv, Ukraine’s military said on Friday. In the Kherson region, Russian artillery hit civilians in the Berislav district who were in their yards rather than sheltering, the regional police said on Friday. They did not say how many people were killed or wounded.
In Zaporizhzhia, rescue workers found more bodies on Friday as they cleared the rubble from a missile strike on a residential area a day earlier, raising the death toll to 12, including two children, with more probably still under the debris, local officials said.
The State of the War
“We had many victims who have been injured and are in hospital, and 15 other people have been reported missing, so we continue searching for them,” said Anatolii Kurtiev, the acting mayor. Large-scale humanitarian convoys out of the city were suspended.
Throughout the war, Zaporizhzhia, a regional hub on the Dnipro River, has often been the first way station for the most vulnerable of civilians, those fleeing the destruction and Russian occupation farther east and south. Even so, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in an overnight video address, the city is “subjected to massive rocket attacks every day.”
The new Nobel laureates include Memorial, a Russian rights group that Mr. Putin’s government suppressed for years and then ordered to shut down; Ales Bialiatski, a jailed activist in Belarus, a close Kremlin ally from whose soil some Russian forces have attacked Ukraine; and the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine, which has worked to document Russian atrocities in Ukraine.
The United Nations Human Rights Council on Friday voted — over Russia’s strenuous objections — to commission an investigation of human rights in Russia, approving a resolution that noted “the clear connection between domestic repression and war abroad.”
Friday also marked a milestone of another sort, as Mr. Putin turned 70. The president of Belarus gave him a tractor. Tajikistan’s leader presented him with a pile of watermelons.
And many Ukrainians wished that this birthday would be his last.
Countless memes denounced or mocked Mr. Putin. Ukrainian hackers broke into the website of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a body akin to NATO for post-Soviet states, and posted the message: “We want to congratulate Putin on his last birthday and wish him a ‘comfortable’ trip to The Hague.” The website was later taken down.
Oct. 7, 2022, 7:25 p.m. ET
Russia’s news media, under tight control by Moscow, trumpeted Mr. Putin’s 22-year tenure as the country’s leader. The newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda flattered him with parallels to imperial strongmen of the czarist and Soviet past, like Peter the Great, Joseph Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev.
Videos circulated online of young people praising Mr. Putin. One showed kindergartners in central Russia performing a dance for the president, and in another, students in St. Petersburg arranged their bodies into the words “Putin Is My President.”
But shows of adulation belied the turmoil within Russia, where there has been rising — and increasingly public — criticism of both the war effort and the draft Mr. Putin ordered.
What the Kremlin expected would be a lightning defeat of Ukraine has turned into a bloody debacle now in its eighth month, with Russian casualties and losses in matériel few people thought possible. And after months on the offensive, Russian forces have been in steady retreat for the past month, losing thousands of square miles of territory they had taken earlier in the year. Russia claims to have annexed four regions of Ukraine, even as its partial hold on them weakens.
Ukrainian troops say that what they see in their Russian counterparts is panic, with the Kremlin’s demoralized soldiers surrendering and abandoning equipment in growing numbers. In an intelligence assessment released on Friday, the British Defense Ministry said that Russian equipment, captured intact, includes at least 440 tanks and 650 other armored vehicles, and might make up more than half of Ukraine’s tank fleet.
“The failure of Russian crews to destroy intact equipment before withdrawing or surrendering highlights their poor state of training and low levels of battle discipline,” it said.
In a video directed at Russian officers and commanders on Mr. Putin’s birthday, Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister, said: “You have been deceived and betrayed. You were promised an easy ride. And sent to the trap. You pay in blood for someone’s fantasies and false goals.”
Ukrainian casualties have been high, too, though the government has avoided giving detailed figures. Throughout Ukraine, power lines, water pipes, highways, railroads and countless homes have been damaged or destroyed, millions of people have been forced from their homes and millions are out of work.
The areas conquered by Russia and then retaken by Ukraine have suffered the most intense fighting and destruction. People living there face acute shortages of food and electricity, and the problems will only grow worse as winter approaches, the deputy head of the Kherson regional council, Serhiy Khlan, told journalists.
Mr. Putin and his aides have suggested that Russia could use nuclear weapons, and Western officials and analysts speculate about what he might do if Russia’s military situation worsens or his grip on power slips.
President Biden said on Thursday night that the risk of nuclear war was higher than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
“We are trying to figure out: What is Putin’s off ramp?” Mr. Biden said at a fund-raiser in New York. “Where does he find a way out? Where does he find himself where he does not only lose face but significant power?”
Megan Specia reported from Kyiv, Ukraine, and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York. Valeriya Safronova contributed reporting from Vienna, and Nick Cumming-Bruce from Geneva.
