At least 12 people were killed and 90 injured overnight in a major Russian airborne assault on targets across Ukraine, authorities said Wednesday.
The southwestern city of Odessa was hardest hit, with three people killed and six injured after a missile hit a multi-story apartment block during a fifth straight day of missile and drone strikes on the port city that killed at least two other people.
Wednesday’s attack also damaged other civilian and industrial buildings and a gas pipeline, as well as gas infrastructure elsewhere in Odesa away from the province’s capital, according to Governor Oleh Kiper.
“The enemy is deliberately targeting the civilian population and the region’s civilian, industrial, and port infrastructure,” said Kiper.
The Russian Defense Ministry confirmed the attack on Odessa, saying it was targeting port infrastructure, “used for the unloading of petroleum, oil, and lubricants” as well as sites linked to military hardware manufacturing and cargo logistics.
The Ukrainian Air Force said Russian forces attacked other regions across the country with two cruise missiles and more than 120 drones but that air defenses managed to shoot down or disable more than four-fifths of the drones.
In the northeast, two people were killed and ten injured in 22 strikes across Kharkiv province, including Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, and three people were killed and 30 were injured in and around the city of Sumy.
The fatalities in Sumy city were the result of a guided bomb attack.
Strikes on Chernihiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk killed another four people and injured 44.
Ukraine hit back, claiming its drones struck 20 Russian ships in the Black Sea overnight.
The exchanges coincided with the arrival in Kyiv of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on her 11th visit for talks on ways for the defense industries of Europe and Ukraine to work together, as well as Kyiv’s accession to the European Union and help to get Ukraine through next winter.
“Ukraine has in many ways become a net security provider for Europe. And that also entails a new way of working together. This is why today we’re launching a new EU-Ukraine Defence Industrial Partnership. So we can build more and faster,” von der Leyen said in a post on X on Wednesday.
Recent months have seen a significant escalation of Russian strikes targeting civilian centers of population, Kyiv in particular, while Ukraine has been using its growing drone capabilities to hit Russia’s energy infrastructure, and more recently, Crimea and other occupied territories.
June was Ukraine’s worst for civilian casualties, save for April 2022 just after Russia’s full-scale invasion, with at least 293 killed and almost 2 000 injured, according to a report published Thursday by the United Nations’ human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine. (UPI)