KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A regional governor says at least three people were killed and 25 wounded after missiles hit civilian buildings in an overnight attack in the central city of Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine.
Gov. Serhiy Lysak of the Dnipropetrovsk region said the strike involving cruise missiles hit a five-story residential building early 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 Zelenskyy’s hometown is the latest bloodshed in Russia’s war in Ukraine, now in its 16th month, as Ukrainian forces are mounting counteroffensive operations using Western-supplied firepower to try to drive out the Russians.
Images from the scene relayed by Zelenskyy 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 nearby 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.
The Kyiv military administration reported that the capital came under fire as well on Tuesday, but the incoming missiles were destroyed by air defenses and there were no immediate reports of any casualties there.
A day earlier, Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said the country’s troops recaptured a total of seven villages spanning 90 square kilometers (35 square miles) over the past week - small successes in the early phases of a counteroffensive.
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 meter by meter to regain the roughly one-fifth of their country under Russian occupation.
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