KIEV, Ukraine — Ten people were killed Tuesday after Russian missiles hit residential buildings in an overnight attack on Krivoy Rog, the mayor of the central Ukrainian city said.
Oleksandr Vilkul said 28 people had been injured and at least one more was trapped in the rubble. In a message in the early afternoon, the alderman wrote on Telegram that dozens of the injured were taken to city hospitals.
The cruise missile attack hit a five-story residential building, which was engulfed in flames, Serhiy Lysak, governor of the Dnipropetrovsk province, explained on Telegram.
The devastation in the hometown of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is the latest bloody episode in Russia’s 16-month-old war in Ukraine as Ukrainian forces step up their counteroffensive with Western-supplied weapons to try to drive troops out of Moscow.
Footage from the scene broadcast by Zelenskyy on his Telegram channel showed firefighters battling the blaze as flames erupted through the building’s multiple broken windows. Damaged and burned vehicles littered the vicinity.
“More terrorist missiles,” he wrote on the messaging app. “Russian killers continue their war against residential buildings, cities and normal people.”
This airstrike was the largest of those launched by Russia on various parts of Ukraine overnight.
The country’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, was attacked by Iranian-made Shahed drones and the surrounding region was hit by shelling, Governor Oleh Syniehubov said Tuesday on Telegram. The shelling injured two civilians in the town of Shevchenkove, southeast of Kharkiv, he added.
For his part, the mayor of Kharkiv, Ihor Terekhov, reported early Tuesday damage to public service companies and a warehouse in the northeast of the city. Neither of the two presidents mentioned victims in Kharkiv.
kyiv’s military administration said the capital was also attacked on Tuesday, but the missiles were destroyed by anti-aircraft defenses and no casualties were immediately reported.
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Air defenses shot down 10 of 14 cruise missiles and one of four Shahed drones launched by Russian forces overnight, the Ukrainian Army General Staff explained on its Facebook page.
For his part, the commander of the Ukrainian ground troops said that the forces are “advancing” on the outskirts of Bakhmut, in the Donetsk province.
In a message on Telegram, Oleksandr Syrskyi, claimed that Russian troops are “losing flank positions” near the disputed eastern city, while presenting Ukrainian operations in that area as “defensive.”
For weeks, Ukrainian authorities have been reporting small gains west of Bakhmut, which Moscow seized last month after the longest and bloodiest battle of the war.
Also on Tuesday, Russia’s Defense Ministry released a video showing what it says is a German-made Leopard 2 tank and a US-made Bradley fighting vehicle seized from Ukrainian troops. According to the ministry, the images were recorded by Russian soldiers after intense fighting in Zaporizhia, in the south of the country, and it shows a soldier pointing at the immobilized vehicles. The authenticity of the video could not be immediately verified.
As in Bakhmut, the combat zones in Zaporizhia are one of the points on the nearly 1,000-kilometre (600-mile) front where Ukrainian forces have intensified their counteroffensive.
On Monday, Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said the country’s troops recaptured a total of seven villages in a 90-square-kilometre (35-square-mile) stretch over the past week — small successes in the early phases of the counteroffensive. .
The attack on the hospital comes hours after Russian forces launched a barrage of drones on Dnipro as well.
Russian officials did not confirm those Ukrainian advances, which were impossible to verify and could be reversed in the course of the war.
The advance equates to small chunks of territory and underscored the difficulty of the battle ahead for Ukrainian forces, who will have to fight meter by meter to recapture about a fifth of their country from Russian occupation.
