NEW YORK, NY.- The civilian toll is rising in Odesa, the Ukrainian port city that has been under relentless attack by Russian forces in the past week after the Kremlin pulled out of an agreement that allowed for the export of Ukrainian grain through the Black Sea.

One person died and 22 others, including four children, were wounded in Russian missile strikes on Odesa overnight Sunday, according to Ukrainian officials. At least six residential buildings were damaged, as was an Orthodox cathedral where rescuers pulled an icon devoted to the patron saint of the city out of the rubble.

At least 25 historic landmarks were damaged, Ukrainska Pravda reported.

“There can be no excuse for Russian evil,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine said about the attacks in a Telegram posting Sunday, adding, “There will definitely be a retaliation.”

With its busy port, Odesa has long been a crucial economic link for Ukraine to the rest of the global economy. Even though the city was subject to attacks earlier in the war, there had been a fleeting sense of normalcy because for almost a year it had been shipping out agricultural products despite a wartime blockade by Russia.

But that ended last week, after Russia said it was ending its participation in the Black Sea grain deal, an agreement that had helped stabilize food prices across the globe. Moscow has said the pact favored Ukraine.

In recent days, Russia has launched some of the war’s most furious attacks on Odesa, destroying grain that could have fed tens of thousands of people for a year. The strikes have also killed at least one other civilian and wounded at least two others. The Kremlin has threatened more hostilities, saying it will treat any ships sailing around Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea as military targets.

The cathedral is Odesa’s largest Orthodox one and has remained aligned with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is backed by Moscow, despite the move by many parishes in Ukraine to join a branch that is loyal to Kyiv in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion last year.

Founded in 1794, the building, also known as Transfiguration Cathedral, became the most important church in Novorossiya, the name given by the Russian Empire to land along the Black Sea and Crimea that is part of present-day Ukraine. It was destroyed during a Soviet campaign against religion in 1936 and was not rebuilt until after the fall of the Soviet Union.

In 2010, Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, consecrated the newly rebuilt cathedral, a sign of the close ties between the church and Moscow. Twelve years later, after Moscow began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kirill “blessed” the war effort and said that Russians who fought in Ukraine would have their sins “washed away.”

There was no immediate comment from the patriarch or the Kremlin on the damage to the cathedral on Sunday.

The Russian Ministry of Defense said it had targeted military infrastructure in Odesa and blamed the damage to the cathedral on “actions” by Ukrainian air defense teams, saying in a post on the Telegram app that “the most likely cause of its destruction was the fall of a Ukrainian anti-aircraft guided missile.”




UNESCO said in a statement that it condemned “in the strongest terms the brazen attack carried out by the Russian forces, which hit several cultural sites in the city center of Odesa.” It added, “This outrageous destruction marks an escalation of violence against cultural heritage of Ukraine.”

The intentional destruction of cultural sites may amount to a war crime, it said, as acknowledged also by the United Nations Security Council, of which Russia is a permanent member.

On Saturday, Zelenskyy warned of the dire fallout of Russian actions in the Black Sea.

“Any destabilization in this region and the disruption of our export routes will mean problems with corresponding consequences for everyone in the world,” he said in his nightly address. Food prices could surge, he said.

The grain deal, brokered by the United Nations and Turkey about a year ago, helped stabilize food prices worldwide. But now, Russia’s withdrawal from the agreement could again threaten food security in several countries already reeling from multiple crises, especially in the Horn of Africa.

Zelenskyy is pushing for more aid from NATO. Following a meeting Saturday with the alliance’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, Zelenskyy said that the Ukraine-NATO Council, a new body that hopes to deepen the alliance between Ukraine and its allies, would soon meet about the situation in Odesa and the Black Sea.

Also on Sunday, President Vladimir Putin of Russia said that Ukraine’s counteroffensive, launched last month to reclaim territory in the south and east of the country, “has failed.” The Russian leader’s comments were reported by Tass, the state news agency, after he met with President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus in St. Petersburg, Russia. It was one of the first public meetings between the two leaders since Lukashenko negotiated an end to last month’s brief mutiny by Russia’s Wagner mercenary group.

Lukashenko claimed without evidence that Wagner fighters were itching to invade Poland. They “are asking to go to the West,” the Belarusian leader declared on camera. He also claimed they said, “We’ll go on an excursion to Warsaw, to Rzeszow,” referring to a Polish city less than 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the border with Ukraine.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN in an interview broadcast Sunday that Ukraine had taken back about half of the territory Russia seized.

Blinken appeared to be referring to the amount of territory recaptured since the full-scale invasion began 17 months ago. Almost all of that land was reclaimed during a counteroffensive last summer and fall, when Ukraine recaptured parts of the Kherson region in the south and parts of the Kharkiv region in the northeast.

At the same time, many Ukrainians look at the total amount of land lost to Russia since 2014, when Moscow illegally annexed the Crimea region and seized large tracts of land in Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the east, including the regional capitals. Almost all of that land remains in Russian hands.

This summer, all eyes are on the new Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south and east, which so far has not achieved a significant breakthrough.

“These are still relatively early days of the counteroffensive,” which Blinken called “tough,” adding: “It will not play out over the next week or two. We’re still looking I think at several months.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.