Zelenskyy says Russia will be “held responsible for this terror” as Ukrainian troops push forward with the attack on Kursk.
Ukrainian authorities said a Russian missile hit a supermarket in the eastern town of Kostiantynivka, killing at least 14 people and wounding 43, as Ukrainian forces pressed ahead with their incursion into Russia’s Kursk region.
The shopping center in the eastern province of Donetsk was hit by a missile fired from a plane on Friday, hitting the site in the middle of the day. Photos of the aftermath showed the market in smoldering ruins.
“This is another targeted attack on a crowded place, another act of terror by the Russians,” Donetsk regional head Vadym Filashkin said in a Telegram post.
Friday’s attack is the second of its kind in the city in the past year, with 17 people killed when a Russian missile hit an open-air market last September.
In a post on Telegram, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Russia would be “held responsible for this terror”.
The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) said in a statement that July was the deadliest month for Ukrainian civilians since October 2022, as Russia intensified bombings.
“The high number of casualties in July continued an alarming trend of increasing civilian casualties since March 2024,” said a statement from the HRMMU.
Meanwhile, Russian authorities declared a “federal-level” state of emergency in the Kursk region, four days after Ukrainian forces launched what appears to be their largest cross-border attack on Russian territory since the start of the war.
The RIA-Novosti news agency reported that reinforcements were being sent to combat the Ukrainian incursion, including rocket launchers, artillery and tanks, citing the Defense Ministry.
“The operational situation in the Kursk region remains difficult,” Kursk acting governor Alexei Smirnov said on Telegram. Russian authorities said around 3,000 people had been evacuated due to the fighting.
Ukraine’s objectives in the attack are unclear, but Myhailo Podolyak, one of Zelenskyy’s top advisers, said on Thursday that it would force the Russians to confront the reality that “the war is slowly creeping inside Russian territory.”
The US Department of Defense said on Friday that the attack was “consistent” with US policy that discourages Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory due to concerns that such acts could escalate the conflict.
Marina Miron, a military analyst at King’s College London, called the Ukrainian campaign a “slap in the face to Russia”.
“This has to be stopped from an informational point of view in order to show that Russia can indeed defend its borders,” Miron told Al Jazeera.
The Ukrainian military intelligence agency also said that Ukrainian special forces carried out an attack on the Russian-occupied Kinburn Spit in the Black Sea on Friday, destroying six armored vehicles.
Peter Zalmayev, executive director of the Eurasia Democracy Initiative, said this is the first time a sovereign foreign power has crossed Russian borders in active military combat since the end of World War II.
Zalmayev told Al Jazeera that the Ukrainian offensive could be aimed at pushing Russian forces away from the Donbass front lines and instilling fear in the hearts and minds of Russian soldiers fighting in the area.
“Furthermore, the aim is to expose Vladimir Putin’s regime as a colossus with feet of clay, so to speak, to show its elites that it is not as strong as it appears to be,” he said.
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
