Kyiv – Russian missiles struck the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia far behind the frontlines on Thursday in an attack which Ukrainian officials said had left at least 12 people dead, including a small child.
The strike, which Ukraine said had also wounded dozens, came a day after a breakthrough in talks between Moscow and Kyiv to unblock Ukrainian grain exports and underscored how far the two countries remain from any kind of peace settlement despite progress in those negotiations.
“There are wounded and dead, among them a small child,” Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskiy wrote on the Telegram messaging app. “What is this, if not an open act of terrorism?”
The Russian defence ministry, which denies targeting civilians, did not immediately comment on the strike.
Russia, which launched what it called its “special military operation” against Ukraine on February 24 this year, said its aim was to degrade Ukraine’s military infrastructure to protect its own security.
Vinnytsia lies about 200 kilometres (125 miles) southwest of the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, and it is far from the main frontlines in eastern and southern Ukraine in a conflict that the West and Ukraine call an unprovoked war of aggression.
The Russian strike hit the car park of the nine-storey “Yuvelirniy” office block at about 10:50 a.m. local time (3:50 a.m. East Caribbean Time), Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said.
It posted photographs showing grey smoke rising from the twisted remains of burnt-out cars and smouldering rubble nearby.
Video footage posted on Telegram by Oleksiy Goncharenko, a Ukrainian politician, showed thick black smoke billowing out of a tall building.
On the frontlines of the war hundreds of miles to the east, Ukraine said it had repelled attempted Russian ground assaults after Moscow focussed its fire on and around two towns there which it views as spring-boards to taking control of bigger cities.
(Reuters)
Farmers harvest wheat as Vuhlehirsk’s heat power plant burns in the distance after a shelling, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in the Donbas region – Reuters