Houses destroyed by a Russian air strike, in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on Oct. 10.Stringer/Reuters
Russian overnight and early morning attacks on Ukraine hit civilian and critical infrastructure facilities, injuring at least seven people across the country, authorities said on Thursday.
A flurry of Russian guided bomb strikes early in the morning injured six people, including a 17-year-old girl, and damaged 29 buildings in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia, its regional governor Ivan Fedorov said.
The city of Zaporizhzhia has been pounded by Russian guided bombs in recent weeks. Russian forces partially occupy the surrounding region, which is home to Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, also controlled by Russian forces.
Ukraine’s air force said on the Telegram messaging app that it had downed 41 out of 62 drones launched by Russia. Russian forces also launched eight missiles, it added, while 14 drones were “locationally lost”.
“As a result of the Russian missile and drone attacks civilian objects and critical infrastructure facilities in the Odesa, Poltava and Donetsk regions were hit,” it said.
A drone attack on the central city of Kryvyi Rih injured two people and damaged a five-storey residential building, causing a fire, Dnipropetrovsk regional governor Serhiy Lysak said.
The emergency services rescued seven people from the damaged part of the building and put out the fire at the site, he added.
Separately, a cruise missile attack late on Wednesday damaged a storage area at an infrastructure facility in the southern Ukrainian region of Mykolaiv, causing a blaze that was later extinguished, governor Vitaliy Kim said.
Regional authorities also reported late on Wednesday that a ballistic missile attack had hit port infrastructure in the Odesa region, killing six people and damaging a Panama-flagged container ship.
Meanwhile, outmanned Ukrainian forces were fending off assaults by Russian troops inside the strategic city of Toretsk, Kyiv’s military said late on Wednesday.
Kremlin troops have been capturing village by village in Ukraine’s industrial heartland in a campaign to wear down key defences and threaten transit routes that are critical to Kyiv’s forces there.
Street fighting was raging in Toretsk, a front-line city since 2014, with Russian troops plowing forward and “completely erasing” buildings and structures, military spokesperson Anastasia Bobovnikova told Reuters.
“This forces our troops to move around, since there is nothing to hold onto in those sectors,” said Bobovnikova, a spokesperson for the “Luhansk” Operational Tactical Group. “This is a scorched-earth tactic.”
Capturing hilltop Toretsk, military analysts say, would allow Moscow to further obstruct a supply line that connects the operational rear with Ukrainian forces in much of the east.
Russian forces are also pressing on the strategic city of Pokrovsk, which sits at the other end of that route.
More than one thousand residents remain in Toretsk, out of a pre-war population of around 60,000, but evacuating them is “extremely difficult” because of indiscriminate Russian shelling, Bobovnikova added.