At least 16 people were killed and nearly sixty injured on Friday in one of the worst Russian missile attacks on Odessa, a large port city in southern Ukraine that has already been targeted twice in recent days.
“Russia continues to terrorize Odessa […] Sixteen people were killed and 58 were injured in the missile attack,” Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriï Kostin said in a final report on X.
“Residents, an ambulance driver and a rescue worker” were among those killed, regional governor Oleg Kiper said shortly before on Telegram. At least eight emergency service workers were injured, according to the prosecutor.
The town hall declared a day of mourning on Saturday following this attack, one of the deadliest on Odessa since the start of the Russian invasion two years ago.
“Russian terror in Odessa is a sign of enemy weakness,” said the head of the presidential administration, Andriy Iermak, on Telegram.
According to the Ukrainian army, Russian forces fired “Iskander ballistic missiles from Crimea” (annexed by Russia in 2014), and there were two consecutive strikes on the same site, the Ukrainian situation service said. emergency.
After a first missile strike damaged civilian infrastructure and caused a fire, rescuers arrived and began to “extinguish the fire, clear the rubble and search for victims” when “the enemy launched another missile attack”, said the emergency services.
In images released by Ukrainian emergency services, we can see injured rescuers, their faces stained, being helped by their colleagues.
Three strikes since March
This is the third fatal attack since the beginning of March in Odessa.
On March 3, a drone strike on an apartment building killed 12 people, including five children, and on March 6 a bombing killed five people, at a time when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis were traveling in the city.
In recent months, Russia has increased attacks on the city and its port, a crucial platform for Ukrainian grain exports in the Black Sea via a maritime corridor established by Kiev after Moscow’s exit from an agreement which allowed Ukraine to export its production.
This Friday, the day Russians began voting for a presidential election that Vladimir Putin is sure to win, Moscow and kyiv also reported civilians killed in mutual artillery and drone attacks during the night.
In the Russian region of Belgorod, bordering Ukraine, a civilian and a fighter were killed and two civilians injured in Ukrainian bombings, announced the governor of this territory, Vyacheslav Gladkov.
Pro-kyiv Russian fighters have launched incursions into several Russian regions in recent days. The Russian army assured on Friday that it had pushed them all back.
Intense attacks in the east
The occupation authorities installed by Moscow for their part affirmed in the morning that three children had died in nighttime Ukrainian bombings in Donetsk, a city in eastern Ukraine controlled by Russia.
Ukrainian police, for their part, announced that Russian drone attacks during the night had killed a couple and injured two teenagers in the Vinnytsia region (central-west), more than 400 kilometers from the front line.
In southern Ukraine, a 76-year-old woman died in a Russian bombing in the Zaporizhia region, the regional administration said.
The commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armies Oleksandr Syrsky finally declared on Telegram on Friday that Russia had “concentrated its main efforts” around Avdiïvka, a town taken from the Ukrainians in February and “has been trying for several days to break through the Ukrainian defense” there.
At the same time, the Ukrainian center responsible for prisoners of war announced that it had recovered the remains of 100 soldiers who fell at the front.
This type of exchange, along with that of captive soldiers, constitutes one of the last areas in which Moscow and kyiv have cooperated since the start of the invasion.