Russia on Saturday bombed a residential building in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, killing three people and wounding 52 as it stepped up renewed hostilities.
Four guided bombs hit Ukraine’s second-largest city, which is near the Russian border, Officials said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy posted video footage of the torn-off facade of an apartment block and a crater outside.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“Russian terrorists have again hit Kharkiv with guided bombs,” Zelenskiy wrote on Telegram, announcing three dead as rescuers searched the rubble.
Fifty-two people were wounded, including three teenagers, the regional prosecutor’s office said.
Kharkiv Governor Oleg Synegubov had earlier said that “Doctors are fighting for the lives of four patients — two women and two men, who are in serious condition.”
He posted photographs of blown-out windows, and cars and a minibus damaged by the blast, which tore through the walls of flats, leaving tangled wreckage and rubble.
Rescuers worked with dogs, cutting through doors and dousing a fire in the flats near the city’s central bus station.
Bodies in bags were laid on the ground outside, while one dead woman lay at a bus stop, her bag by her side, an Agence France-Presse journalist saw.
An elderly woman with blood running down her face and legs was helped onto a stretcher as she protested she did not want to go to hospital.
“Only civilian infrastructure was damaged,” Synegubov said.
“Since the beginning of this June alone, Russians have used more than 2,400 guided aerial bombs against Ukraine already, about 700 of which were targeted at the Kharkiv region,” Zelenskiy said in a later statement. “This is calculated terror.”
Russia launched a new offensive in the region last month, taking significant territory, and has increasingly targeted Kharkiv.
Prosecutors said that Russia used its new UMPB D-30 SN guided bombs for the latest attack on Kharkiv, launched from the Belgorod region bordering Ukraine.
Russia’s Rossiiskaya Gazeta newspaper wrote this month that the weapons are now being used in the Ukraine war.
They can be fired from the ground at long range, as well as from planes, meaning “it is almost impossible to anticipate” an attack, it wrote.
“This Russian terror with guided bombs must be stopped and can be stopped. We need strong decisions from our partners so that we can destroy Russian terrorists and Russian combat aircraft where they are,” Zelenskiy said.
In Zaporizhzhia, Russian artillery shelling also killed one civilian, the regional military administration said.
A policeman staffing a checkpoint was killed by a drone in the southern Kherson Oblast, police said.
Five civilians were killed by shelling in front line areas of Donetsk Oblast, Governor Vadym Filashkin said.
Front line clashes were reported near the towns of Pokrovsk and Toretsk, where Moscow “continues to increase the pace of offensive actions, deploying significant forces,” the Ukrainian military said.
The Russian Ministry of Defense said troops had improved positions in the Donetsk, Lugansk and Kharkiv regions.
However, the region had come under attack from Ukraine, said Denis Pushilin, the head of Russian authorities in Donetsk.
Three men working for a construction firm were killed by cluster munitions, he said.
In Russia’s southern Belgorod Oblast, a man was killed in the shelling of a farm near the border, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said.
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