By Bogdan Kochubey
kyiv (Reuters) – Russian attacks on Ukraine’s Kharkiv and Dnipro regions and the Black Sea port city of Odessa have killed at least two civilians, set fire to a food factory and damaged other infrastructure, homes and buildings. commercial buildings Saturday, regional officials said.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russia used eight missiles of various types and nearly 70 guided aerial bombs against frontline communities and positions during the day, after Ukraine’s air force shot down 13 Shahed drones that targeted the Kharkiv and Dnipro regions overnight.
Zelenskiy said Moscow had no desire for peace. “Russia can only be forced to leave Ukraine alone,” he said in his nightly video speech. A global peace summit to be held in Switzerland in June – without Russia – “must succeed”, he said.
He said Ukraine’s 110th Mechanized Brigade shot down a Russian Su-25 fighter-bomber over the eastern Donetsk region, one of four regions of Ukraine that Moscow says it has annexed.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Friday that Moscow had taken control of 547 km² of these territories this year.
Oleh Syniehubov, governor of the Kharkiv region, said Russian shelling killed a 49-year-old man on the street near his home in the village of Slobozhanske. An 82-year-old woman was killed and two men were injured during an overnight shelling in the city of Kharkiv, he wrote on the Telegram app.
A Russian missile attack set fire to a business premises in an industrial district of the city of Kharkiv, injuring six employees, he added. Local prosecutors identified it as a food factory.
In the south, Odessa regional governor Oleh Kiper said three people were injured in the city by a missile strike.
Reuters could not immediately verify reports of casualties and damage.
An air force commander said air defenses shot down all 13 attack drones overnight, but Syniehubov said falling debris injured four people and sparked a fire at an office building .
In the industrial region of Dnipropetrovsk, shelling injured a 57-year-old woman and damaged infrastructure in Nikopol, near Russia’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, and two others were injured in another nighttime attack, the governor said regional Serhiy Lysak.
(Reporting, writing by Elaine Monaghan in Washington; additional reporting by Ron Popeski and Olena Harmash; editing by Kevin Liffey and Ros Russell)
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