No fewer than eight people have been confirmed dead and 31 others wounded after two Russian missiles hit residential buildings in the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region, Ukrainian officials said.
Videos and pictures released by Ukrainian authorities on Tuesday which was obtained by Africa Today News, New York showed people sorting through the rubble including at a badly damaged five-storey apartment building. An ambulance was on the scene treating the wounded.
According to Donetsk regional Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko, a total of eight individuals lost their lives in the attacks. Among the deceased were five civilians, two rescue workers, and one military personnel.
Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said earlier that four civilians died in the first attack and an emergency official was killed during the second attack. Search-and-rescue operations were ongoing, Klymenko said.
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Ten members of the Ukrainian security services were among the 31 wounded, most of whom were civilians, officials said.
The strikes damaged a hotel, residential buildings and other civilian structures, Kyrylenko said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in an online statement, accused Russia of trying to leave nothing but “broken and scorched stones” in eastern Ukraine. His remarks accompanied footage of a damaged, five-storey residential building with one floor partially destroyed.
Pokrovsk had a pre-war population of about 60,000 people.
Russia’s foreign ministry on Monday denounced the two-day talks in Jeddah as not having ‘the slightest added value’ because Moscow – unlike Kyiv – had not been invited. A foreign ministry statement repeated previous assurances that Moscow is open to a diplomatic solution, on its terms, that would end the 17-month-old war and that it is ready to respond to serious proposals.
The Kremlin’s demands include Kyiv recognising Russia’s annexation of four Ukrainian regions, which Russian forces at this point only partially control, and Crimea, which Moscow seized in 2014.
But Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskyy, ruled out Moscow’s previous demands, which would give Russia time to dig in deeper in the parts of Ukraine it has occupied. He said on X, formerly known as Twitter, that Russian forces must fully withdraw from the occupied areas and there would be no compromise by Kyiv on that.