Russian attack on southeastern Ukrainian town kills seven, injures 18, officials say

KYIV - Russian forces on June 29 fired missiles at the town of Vilniansk, outside the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, killing seven people, including two children, and injuring 31 others, officials said.

President Volodymyr Zelensky repeated his appeal to allies to provide Ukraine with more long-range weapons and enhanced air defences to stop what he said were daily attacks.

Ukraine’s Prosecutor-General Andriy Kostin said two missiles were fired on the town, damaging infrastructure, a shop and residential buildings.

Emergency services put the death toll at seven, including two children, with 31 others injured, eight of them children. Firefighters had put out blazes in several buildings and completed rescue operations.

“Today, the enemy carried out yet another dreadful terrorist act against the civilian population,” Zaporizhzhia regional governor Ivan Fedorov said, in a video posted on the Telegram messaging app.

The attack occurred in “the middle of the day, a non-working day, in the town centre, where people were out relaxing, where there were no military targets,” Mr Fedorov said.

Mr Zelensky posted photos from the site showing a large crater, downed trees and a pair of tarpaulins spread out on the ground of what looked like a park.

“Our cities and communities suffer daily from such Russian strikes. But there are ways to overcome this,” Mr Zelensky wrote on Telegram.

“Destroying terrorists where they are. Destroying Russian missile launchers, striking with real long-range capability and increasing the number of modern air defence systems in Ukraine” were ways to defend the country from such attacks, Mr Zelensky said.

Russia’s Defence Ministry did not reply to a request for comment on the incident.

The Russian ministry, writing on Telegram, said its missiles had struck a nearby area in Zaporizhzhia region where it said Ukrainian trains unloaded arms and military equipment, killing soldiers and destroying armoured vehicles and missiles.

The post, accompanied by a photo of a strike, identified the site as the village of Ukrainka, less than 10km from Vilniansk.

Reuters could not independently verify battlefield accounts from either side.

In eastern Ukraine, officials reported deadly attacks on the morning of June 29 that killed four people in villages.

“In (the village of) Zarichne, Russians killed three people,” Mr Vadym Filashkin, the head of the Donetsk region, said on social media.

The office of Ukraine’s General Prosecutor later said another person, a resident of the eastern village of New York “also sustained fatal injuries.”

New York has been intensely attacked since mid-June as Russian forces push towards the city of Toretsk, further north.

In the central city of Dnipro, police said they found a woman who was killed in an attack a day earlier that also wounded 13 people.

“Police identified a woman killed in a missile attack on Dnipro city. She is a 76-year-old resident of a destroyed apartment block,” Ukraine’s National Police said in a statement.

It said the number of wounded in the attack rose to 13, “including an infant and a pregnant woman.” REUTERS, AFP