The oddly named settlement is a stronghold of Ukrainian troops north of Donetsk
© Telegram / VadimFilashkin_donoda
At least three people were injured in a Russian strike on New York, a town in the Ukrainian-controlled Donetsk Region, the local military governor said on Monday.
New York is right on the frontline, west of Gorlovka and north of Donetsk city. Heavy fighting is currently taking place both north and south of the town, on the outskirts of Artyomovsk (known in Ukraine as Bakhmut) and around Avdeevka, respectively.
Two aerial bombs struck a three-story building in New York and a rocket destroyed the entrance, causing the building to collapse, local military governor Vadim Filashkin wrote in a post on Telegram. In addition to three wounded people, five more are buried under the rubble, he said, calling the incident a “cynical Russian attack on the civilian population.”
The Russian military has not commented on the alleged airstrike.
New York was founded in 1859 by a group of Mennonite Protestants from Germany. During the Soviet Union it was renamed Novgorodskoe (New City), but the old name was restored in mid-2021.
In the summer of 2014 it was briefly under control of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), which had declared independence after the US-backed coup in Kiev. After about three months, it was taken by the Ukrainian military, reinforced by “volunteer battalions” such as the neo-Nazi ‘Azov’. It has remained under Kiev’s control ever since.
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The Ukrainian government continues to insist that its strategic objective is “to get to the 1991 borders,” which would include portions of the Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions that chose to join Russia in 2022, as well as Crimea, which voted to rejoin in 2014.
Moscow has said that recognizing reality on the ground was one of the prerequisites for any peace negotiations.
