At least 37 people have been killed in rocket attacks since Thursday that appear to have targeted crowded civilian areas and crowded buildings, a tactic Russia has repeatedly denied using. The attacks came as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned that Russian society had been scarred for generations by the war. Two people were killed by heavy Russian shelling in the Ukrainian city of Nikopol on Saturday, emergency services and the regional governor said. Rescuers recovered the bodies of two people from the rubble. Dnipropetrovsk regional governor Valentin Reznichenko said Russian forces fired 53 Grad rockets into the city. Social media users shared footage said to show rockets flying, black smoke billowing from buildings and burning cars in the southeastern city of Dnipro, the country’s fourth-largest city with more than 1 million residents, where at least three people were killed and 15 were injured after a rocket attack late Friday. “The rockets hit an industrial plant and a busy road next to it,” Reznichenko said on his Facebook page. Russian armed forces destroyed a factory in Dnipro that produced components for Tochka-U ballistic missiles and shot down three Ukrainian planes and two helicopters, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Saturday. A Russian strike hit the northeastern Ukrainian city of Chuhuiv in the Kharkiv region overnight, killing three people, including a 70-year-old woman, and injuring three others, the regional governor said. The strike destroyed a residential block, a school and a shop, and rescuers were wading through the rubble, governor Oleh Synehubov said on Telegram. The governor of the central Ukrainian Poltava region, Dmytro Lunin, confirmed the explosions in Kremenchuk. Another missile was fired over southern Ukrainian territory, according to Odessa military governor Maxim Marchenko. Details of casualties and damage are not yet known. Eight people were killed and 13 wounded in the shelling of 10 locations in the eastern part of Donetsk, Governor Pavlo Kirilenko said in a televised interview on Friday. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has ordered Russian military units operating in all regions of Ukraine to intensify operations to prevent strikes in eastern Ukraine and other Russian-controlled territories, the ministry said in a statement on its website. of on Saturday. It said that Shoigu “gave the necessary instructions to further increase the actions of the groups in all operational areas in order to exclude the possibility of the Kiev regime launching massive rocket and artillery attacks on civilian infrastructure and settlement residents in Donbass and in other areas”. The death toll from Thursday’s rocket attack on the central Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, a city of 370,000 people, rose to 24 on Saturday after a woman died in hospital from burns, a Ukrainian official said. Russia on Friday claimed responsibility for the airstrike in Vinnytsia, far from the front in central Ukraine, which killed three children – a four-year-old girl named Lisa Dmitrieva and two boys aged seven and eight. The Russian Defense Ministry claimed that Ukraine’s Air Force and “foreign arms suppliers” were meeting at the building, which Kyiv denied. In a video address on Saturday morning, Zelensky said Ukraine would preserve “humanity and civilization” and promised to rebuild damaged educational institutions. “But Russian society, with so many murderers and executioners, will remain crippled for generations – through its own fault.” Subscribe to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every weekday morning at 7am Zelensky once again called on Ukrainians not to ignore air raid warnings. A senior Ukrainian official has accused Russia of deliberately escalating its deadly attacks on civilians. Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s national security council, told the Guardian that the monitoring of Russian raids indicated an increased emphasis in recent weeks on terrorizing Ukraine’s civilian population. “These are not my feelings, but what the monitoring tells us.”
