At least three people have been killed and 25 wounded after missiles hit civilian buildings in an overnight attack in the central city of Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, a regional governor said.
Serhiy Lysak, of the Dnipropetrovsk region, said the strike involving cruise missiles hit a five-storey residential building early on Tuesday and the area was engulfed in fire.
He said in a Telegram post that people were trapped under the rubble and rescue operations were ongoing.
The devastation in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s home town is the latest bloodshed in Russia’s war in Ukraine, now in its 16th month, as Ukrainian forces are mounting counter-offensive operations using Western-supplied firepower to try to drive out the Russians.
Images from the scene relayed by Mr Zelensky on his Telegram channel showed firefighters battling the blaze as pockets of fire poked through multiple broken windows of a building.
Charred and damaged vehicles littered the ground.
“More terrorist missiles,” he wrote on the social app. “Russian killers continue their war against residential buildings, ordinary cities and people.”
The aerial assault was the latest barrage of strikes by Russian forces that targeted various parts of Ukraine overnight.
That included Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, which was attacked with Iranian-made Shahed drones, while the surrounding region was shelled, local governor Oleh Syniehubov said on Tuesday on Telegram.
He reported that shelling wounded two civilians — a 33-year-old man and 44-year-old woman — in the town of Shevchenkove, south east of Kharkiv.
The mayor of Kharkiv, Ihor Terekhov, separately reported that a drone strike damaged a utilities business and a warehouse in the city’s north east.
The Kyiv military administration reported that the capital come under fire as well on Tuesday but the incoming missiles were destroyed by air defences.
A day earlier, Ukrainian deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar said the country’s troops recaptured a total of seven villages spanning 90 square kilometres over the past week — small successes in the early phases of a counter-offensive.
Russian officials did not confirm those Ukrainian gains, which were impossible to verify and could be reversed in the to-and-fro of war.
The advance amounted to only small bits of territory and underscored the difficulty of the battle ahead for Ukrainian forces, who will have to fight metre by metre to regain the roughly one-fifth of their country under Russian occupation.
Published: by Radio NewsHub
