Overnight, Russia launched a “massive missile” attack on the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih, Ukrainian officials said early Tuesday. The attack killed and hurt people and damaged civilian infrastructure, they said. Serhiy Lisak, governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region where Kryvyi Rih is located, said on the Telegram message app, “There are dead and injured.”
“A massive missile attack on Kryvyi Rih.”Oleksandr Vilkul, the mayor of Kryvyi Rih, said earlier that Russian air strikes hit several private buildings in the city, including a five-story building. Vilkul said on Telegram that it’s likely that there are people under the rubble.
The story could not be checked by Reuters on its own. Vilkul did not give any more information. Lisak shared a picture of a five-story apartment building with all the windows blown out and smoke coming out of some of them.
Russia didn’t say anything right away about the claimed strikes. Both Russia and Ukraine say that they did not aim at people in the war that Russia started 16 months ago against its neighbor, Ukraine. In the early hours of Tuesday, air raid sirens went off all over Ukraine. Military officials in Kyiv said that all Russian missiles that were headed for the Ukrainian city were destroyed by air defense forces.
The mayor of Kharkiv, a city in the east of Ukraine, said on his Telegram feed that Russian drones had hit a warehouse and a building for a utility company. There was no information right away about who had died.