A Russian strike on a residential building in central Ukraine killed at least 14 people, including two children, emergency services said, one of many attacks across the country this weekend.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia targeted the building in Poltava early Saturday morning, calling the attack “another terrorist crime.”
There has been no let up in the fighting in Ukraine, even with Donald Trump now in the White House having promised to reach a ceasefire quickly.
Ukraine’s army continues to be pushed back on the eastern frontlines in the face of superior Russian manpower and resources.
Among the victims of the strike in Poltava was Olena Yavorska, her husband Dmytro and their 9-year-old daughter Sofia, according to Olena’s colleague, who posted a statement on Facebook.
“Russia killed our colleague and her family,” Volodymyr Popereshniuk, co-owner of Nova Poshta, a Ukranian logistics company where Olena worked, said Sunday. “Olena was a biology teacher by education, but in 2015 she joined Nova Poshta. The Yavorsky family resided on the second floor of the destroyed building.”
Emergency services and psychologists from the country’s national police department are providing help to nearly 200 people, the state emergency service said Sunday. Rescue operations are ongoing, it added.
Meanwhile, Ukraine and Russia traded blame over a deadly strike on a former boarding school on Saturday in Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukrainian troops have been holding territory after launching a shock incursion last summer.
The Ukrainian military said the Russian air force struck the school in the town of Sudzha with a guided aerial bomb, killing at least four people as locals were sheltering in the building and preparing to evacuate. At least 84 more people were rescued and four are in “serious condition,” the Ukrainian military said, calling the attack a “war crime.”
At the same time, the Russian military blamed Ukraine for the attack on the boarding school, also calling it a “war crime.”
“The launch of enemy missiles from the [Ukrainian] Sumy region was detected by Russian air defense systems,” the Russian military said in a statement Sunday.
The statement went on to accuse Ukraine of using the “provocation” to distract global “public opinion from [Ukraine’s] atrocities” in a separate area of the Kursk region.
The spat occurred as Ukraine’s air defenses shot down dozens of drones overnight as Russia carried out fresh attacks, the country’s air force said Sunday.
In total, the air force said it downed 40 out of the 55 drones launched in areas across the country, including the capital Kyiv, but added that Kharkiv and Sumy regions were impacted by the “enemy attack.”
Ukrainian energy infrastructure was also targeted in multiple regions on the night of February 1, Ukraine’s air force added.