At least eight civilians were killed and nearly eighty injured during nighttime Russian airstrikes targeting the Ukrainian capital kyiv and Kharkiv, local authorities announced Tuesday.
In recent weeks, kyiv and Moscow have accused each other of increasing strikes on civilian areas, sometimes with very heavy tolls, while the situation on the front is almost frozen.
“The death toll in Kharkiv stands at seven,” said regional governor Oleg Synegoubov, who earlier said 51 people had been injured.
Another person was killed in Pavlograd, in the Dnipropetrovsk region, in an attack which also left one injured, according to regional leader Serguii Lyssak.
Tuesday morning in Kharkiv, emergency services were evacuating injured residents, some of whom had bloody faces or had to be carried, noted an AFP photographer.
Firefighters battled flames in the rubble of an affected building, while a team of rescuers tried to find survivors.
Twenty-seven people were pulled out of the rubble in Kharkiv, Interior Minister Igor Klymenko said.
A resident, Oleksandra Terekhovitch, explained to AFP that she ran to take refuge in a corridor when she heard a first explosion nearby, then a second “in a neighboring house”.
“There are no more tears to shed” in the face of the war which has lasted for almost two years, she said. “We live with the horror inside us. »
“Upset”
In kyiv, 22 people were injured, said the mayor of the capital, Vitali Klitschko, specifying that “13 were hospitalized, including three children”.
According to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, one person is in a “state of clinical death”, but authorities in the capital have not confirmed this death so far.
A building and vehicles were on fire in the Sviatochynski district of kyiv, according to the same source. In this same neighborhood, the unexploded warhead of a missile was found in an apartment.
In the Pechersk district, a fire broke out in a “non-residential” building.
Daryna Bodenchouk, a 17-year-old student interviewed by AFP near a damaged building in the capital, said she was “distraught”.
“It’s very scary,” she said, explaining that a window had broken in her dorm room.
Three more people were injured by missile fragments in the kyiv region, said the head of the military administration, Ruslan Kravchenko.
Alongside these nighttime attacks, a Russian strike killed a 70-year-old man in the southern city of Kherson, said Oleksandr Prokudin, the regional governor.
Attacks in Russia
According to the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Army, Valery Zaluzhny, Russia targeted Ukraine with 41 missiles, of which 21 were shot down.
Ukraine is urgently demanding more air defense resources from its Western allies, and has set itself the goal of regaining control of the skies above its territory by 2024.
It also increased its own missile and drone attacks on Russian territory this winter, targeting in particular the city of Belgorod.
The Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament, announced that it had voted on Tuesday a text appealing to the UN and parliaments around the world regarding Ukraine’s “criminal attacks” “against civilians on Russian territory”.
Moscow also once again denied having hit civilians in Tuesday’s bombings, claiming, as always for two years, to only hit military targets.
French diplomacy accused Moscow of targeting civilian infrastructure “deliberately”.
The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) said it had noted the damage from these attacks on a school, a kindergarten and residential areas, such as in Kharkiv where a five-story building appeared to have been damaged. was “directly hit by several missiles”.
Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians have been killed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022.
However, there is no reliable assessment, with neither side publishing detailed data and no independent organization, including the UN, being able to provide an exhaustive count of the dead and injured.