The Ukrainian authorities said on Sunday that two air attacks a day before had killed at least 18 civilians, one of the highest tolls of one day so far this year and a dark reminder of the lasting devastation of the war while approaching his fourth year.
The first strike occurred on Saturday morning when a Russian missile hit a residential building in the Ukrainian city of Poltava, almost 150 miles from the front line, killing at least 14 people, including two children, according to local emergency services. The videos of the consequences of the attack showed a section of the building reduced to rubble, with clothes and documents scattered in the area.
A few hours later, the Ukrainian authorities said that a Russian bomb had crashed into a college to Southzha, a city in western Russia that is under Ukrainian control, killing four people.
The Russian Ministry of Defense has blamed Kiev for the deadly south strike and did not face the attack on Poltava. The statements of neither parts could be verified independently.
Ukrainian officials said that about 90 Russian civilians displaced by the nearby fights repaired in the school when the attack occurred. Oleksiy Dmytrashkivkyi, a military spokesman in the area, declared in the text messages that four of those people had been killed and 10 wounds.
“They destroyed the building even if there were dozens of civilians,” said President Volodymyr Zelensky’s president of Ukraine on Saturday evening in a social media place, stressing that those were the “civil” of Russia. He shared the images of the ruins and people covered with dust, visibly shocked by the attack.
Southzha, a small town near the Ukrainian border in the western region of Western Kursk in Russia, was captured by Kiev’s forces during a cross -border assault last summer and has since been occupied by Ukraine.
The attacks on Saturday – the surprising cities both close and far from the first -line lines and killing people of both nations in war – underlined the brutal budget of the war on civilians. Since the invasion of Russia began almost three years ago, over 12,300 civilians have been killed, a United Nations official reported just before Christmas.
The United Nations have noticed a strong increase in the victims of last year due to the use of long -range drones, missiles and bombs of platelet capable of achieving distant objectives. The cities once considered relatively safe – like Lviv, in Western Ukraine and Poltava – now face frequent attacks. In Kyiv, the rare time of Russian drones that flies over the head now echoes regularly all night.
Denys Kliap, director of Free and Unbreakable, a response team to voluntary emergencies in Poltava, said he and his colleagues rushed to the attack site as soon as they heard explosions, finding a pile of rubble and a residential building in flames. “I heard incredible screams from people,” he recalled. “People moaned from under the rubble, shouting help.”
As he approached the remains of the building, Mr. Kliap, 26 years old, came across the torn body of a woman among the rubble. Inside, a colleague found another woman with an open wound, bleeding heavily. Other residents were in a state of shock, he said.
The photographs of the emergency services showed that several plans of the building had collapsed. Some condominium rooms were miraculously left intact, their doors opened on the void left by a collapsed apartment nearby. Dressed dresses in the void, suspended on steel bars and cables.
On Sunday morning, Ukrainian emergency services were still looking for the rubble left by the missile strike the day before. They said they had saved 22 people. Mr. Kliap, speaking by phone from the site, said that the relatives of the residents had gathered there, hoping for the survivors.
“But the rescuers often find only corpses,” he said.
The strike in Poltava has rekindled the memories of a previous attack, in September, in a military academy that killed 50 people, many of them students. The Russian missiles had hit the academy only a few minutes after the air raid alarms had been affected. “For the last year, the feeling of danger among the citizens of Poltava has increased,” said Kliap.
The Ukrainian authorities urged their western partners to provide multiple missiles and air defense systems to protect Ukrainian cities. “We need better protection: air defense systems, long -range weapons and sanctions,” said Zelensky on Sunday, observing that just last week, Russia had launched almost 50 missiles, 660 attack drones and More than 760 Bombs of Glida.
Russian civilians have also increasingly found themselves at risk while the battlefield has partially moved to Russia in areas such as Kursk, where Ukrainian and Russian forces fought and while Ukrainian targeted military bases and oil structures within Russia.
Thousands of civilians were captured in the first days of the fighting and many have remained in the area controlled by Ukraino since then. Since the Russian forces gradually advanced with assaults to recover their land, the continuous battles put civilians in great danger.
Yurii Syvala Contributed relationships.