Kyiv:
A Russian strike in the southern Ukrainian city of Vilniansk killed at least seven people, Kiev said, in an attack that came hours after Russia said a Ukrainian drone killed five people in its border village.
Both countries said two children were killed in each attack in a deadly day in the more than two-year war.
Kiev also said four people were killed in villages on the eastern front line in the Donetsk region.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that the death toll in Vilniansk – near the regional center of Zaporizhzhia – could rise.
“Seven people, including two children, were killed by a Russian missile attack in the Zaporizhzhia region,” Zelensky said on social media.
He called on his Western allies to speed up arms deliveries, saying: “Any delay in decisions in this war means the loss of human life.”
Ukraine’s Interior Minister Igor Klimenko said 18 people – including four children – were injured in Vilniansk.
He posted images of a local low-rise building on fire and blacked-out cars.
The head of the Zaporizhzhia region, Ivan Fedorov, said earlier that “a critical infrastructure facility, a store and residential buildings were damaged” in the strike.
Vilniansk is 29 kilometers (18 miles) northeast of the city of Zaporizhzhia, the main regional city that is under Ukrainian control.
Russia’s attack on Vilniansk came hours after Moscow said a Ukrainian drone on a house in a Russian border village killed five people, including two children.
Five dead in Russian village
Moscow said the drone struck a house in the village of Gorodishche, a small village in Russia’s Kursk region, just meters from the border with Ukraine.
“To our great sadness, five people were killed… including two young children. Two other family members are in serious condition,” Kursk Governor Alexei Smirnov said in a Telegram post.
The attack was carried out with a “helicopter” drone, he added, a small device that can be equipped to carry grenades or other explosives that are dropped on targets.
Both sides used drones, including larger self-detonating craft with ranges of up to hundreds of kilometers, extensively during the conflict that began in February 2022.
Ukraine has intensified its attacks on Russian territory this year, targeting both energy sites that it says supply the Russian military, as well as cities and villages across the border.
Fighting in Ukraine intensified in several directions, as Russia launched offensives from several directions, taking advantage of the fact that Kiev was militarily at a disadvantage.
Four dead in eastern Ukraine
Kiev’s army said on Saturday that Moscow was attacking from several directions and that “the total number of hostile attacks along the entire front line has now increased to 90.”
Ukrainian authorities reported deadly attacks on Saturday morning that killed four people in eastern villages.
“In (the village of) Zarichne, the Russians killed three people,” Vadym Filashkin, head of the Donetsk region, said on social media.
The Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s office later said that another person, a resident of New York’s Eastern Village, “also suffered fatal injuries.”
New York has been heavily attacked since mid-June as Russian forces advance towards the city of Toretsk further north.
In the central city of Dnipro, police said they found a woman dead in an attack the day before that also injured 13 people.
“Police have identified a woman killed in a missile attack in the city of Dnipro. She is a 76-year-old resident of a destroyed apartment building,” Ukraine’s National Police said in a statement.
It said the number of people injured in the attack had risen to 13, “including a child and a pregnant woman.”
(Except the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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