Russian Strikes Kill Five In Ukraine, Destroy Kindergarten

Russian Strikes Kill Five In Ukraine, Destroy Kindergarten

Russian aerial strikes on Monday killed five people and destroyed a kindergarten in eastern Ukraine, authorities said.

Moscow has been intensifying its daily drone and missile barrages in recent months, targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and hitting a number of civilian sites ahead of winter. 

Three were killed and 13 wounded in a strike on a residential area of Balakliya, a frontline city in the northeastern Kharkiv region, Ukraine’s emergency service said, adding that four children were among those wounded. 

First Lady Olena Zelenska slammed the strike.

“The aggressor destroyed several apartment buildings and a kindergarten. An inhuman attack that cannot be justified,” she said on social media.

Photos published by the local administration showed a partly damaged Soviet-era apartment block with all of its glass windows blown out.

A later Russian strike killed two other civilians in the Dnipropetrovsk region, the local governor said. 

A gas cargo vessel sailing under a Turkish flag also caught fire after Russian drones pummelled the city of Izmail in the Odesa region on the Black Sea, the Ukrainian port authority said.

The attack comes a day after President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a deal with Greece to import natural gas via the Trans-Balkan pipeline, which runs through Odesa. 

In October, Moscow launched its biggest bombing campaign against Ukrainian gas facilities since the start of the 2022 invasion, halting 60 percent of the production of the country’s main source of fuel for heating.

Kyiv has regularly targeted Russian fuel depots, oil refineries and other energy facilities that it calls retribution for Moscow’s barrages.

The Moscow-backed governor of the occupied Donetsk region said around 500,000 subscribers had faced a temporary power cut early Monday after a Ukrainian attack. AFP