Featured Image Credit: Associated Press
Topics: Ukraine, Russia, World News
Emily Brown
A 500kg unexploded bomb has been removed an apartment building in Kharkiv after being launched by Russian forces targeting Ukraine.
The huge explosive was deactivated in March after it first landed in Ukraine's second-largest city, but relentless airstrikes in the area have made it difficult to remove until Thursday (23 June).
Footage shared online showed Ukrainian authorities slowly winching the bomb out of the apartment building with a crane.
See the bomb removal in progress here:
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The explosive was carefully placed into a large, heavily fortified truck featuring with the word 'demining' before being taken away from the scene.
It took a 10-person specialist crew to dislodge the bomb from the nine-storey building where it had landed after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an invasion of the neighbouring country.
One of the crew members who helped remove the device said the city 'being calm' offered an opportunity for the team to tackle the bomb, The Independent reports.
The removal came after Kharkiv was targeted with more airstrikes on Tuesday and Wednesday, marking the worst attack in weeks in the area, with 20 people thought to have died as a result.
Authorities in Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, suggested the strikes came as part of a plan to force the country to pull resources from the main battlefields in the Donbas.
In a post on Telegram, Oleh Synehubov, governor of Kharkiv region, wrote: “There is no letup in the shelling of civilians by the Russian occupiers. This is evidence that we cannot expect the same scenario as in Chernihiv or Kyiv, with Russian forces withdrawing under pressure.”
The shelling came just as normal life had been returning to Kharkiv after Ukraine pushed Russian forces back in a counter-offensive last month.
Speaking to Reuters after the latest attacks, Kharkiv prosecutor Mikhailo Martosh said: "It was shelling by Russian troops. It was probably multiple rocket launchers. And it's the missile impact, it's all the missile impact."
An 85-year-old World War II survivor is among those to have been killed by the airstrikes earlier this week, with her grandson, Mykyta, commenting: "She survived one war, but didn't make it through this one. There is nowhere to flee to. Especially grandmother herself, she didn't want to go anywhere from here."
Ukrainian Presidential Adviser Oleksiy Arestovych has suggested Russian forces are hitting Ukraine's second-biggest city 'in the same way that they previously were hitting Mariupol', with the aim of 'terrorising the population'.
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