Russian army strike planners employed new tactics and more sophisticated missiles in its latest, renewed long-range bombardment of Ukrainian cities and towns, Kyiv Post reported.
“The only things hit on both Thursday and Friday, according to reports from the ground, were civilian residences or apartment buildings and those people inside”, the report said.
Sixteen people, including three children, were killed in Uman, a city in Cherkasy Oblast, central Ukraine.
The Guardian quoted regional governor, Igor Taburets, and other local officials as saying that the death toll from a Russian missile strike that hit a nine-storey block of flats in Uman has risen to 19, including two 10-year-old children.
The announcement brings the total number of people killed in the wave of pre-dawn strikes to at least 21, the report said.
Agence France-Presse reporters saw rescue workers extracting victims’ remains from destroyed buildings. “I want to see my children, they are under the rubble,” Dmitry, a 33-year-old local from Luhansk, told them, The Guardian reported.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, condemned the latest barrage and vowed to respond to “Russian terror”. Moscow said it had targeted reserve units of the Ukrainian military and that “all assigned objects were hit”, it said.
The new round of Russian strikes, focusing ever more on civilian targets and trying to exploit gaps in Ukraine’s air defense network, triggered a renewed round of Kyiv appeals to Western nations to provide Ukraine with interceptor aircraft, in particular the US-made F-16 fighter, Kyiv Post report said.
On the night of April 27, the Russians attacked Mykolaiv then, in the early hours of April 28, the country more widely. It was the first major wave of missile strikes on Ukraine and its air defenses in 50 days, the report added.
According to TASS News Agency, Russian assault teams captured four urban areas in Artyomovsk and paratroopers provided support and immobilized enemy forces on the city’s outskirts over the past day during the special military operation in Ukraine, Defense Ministry Spokesman Lieutenant-General Igor Konashenkov reported on Thursday.
Russian forces destroyed roughly 110 Ukrainian troops in the Kupyansk area over the past day, he said.
“In the Kupyansk direction, operational/tactical and army aviation and artillery of the western battlegroup struck the enemy units near the settlements of Dvurechnaya, Figolevka, Yagodnoye, Pershotravnevoye and Tabayevka in the Kharkov Region. As many as 110 Ukrainian personnel, two armored combat vehicles, three motor vehicles and a Grad multiple rocket launcher were destroyed in that direction in the past 24 hours,” the general was reported as saying by the news agency.
Journalist Killed
A Ukrainian journalist, who formerly worked for the BBC, has been killed fighting on the frontline, according to The Guardian.
Oleksandr Bondarenko volunteered for Ukraine’s territorial defence after Russia invaded the country in February 2022, the report said.
He later became part of the military. Details of how he was killed in action are not yet known, BBC News reports.
Bondarenko, known as Sasha or Sashko, worked from 2007 to 2011 at the BBC’s Ukrainian service, broadcasting from Kyiv.
His colleagues paid tribute to the “extraordinary” and “heroic” reporter and news presenter.