Emergency Ministry employees work at the side of a damaged apartment building following Friday's Ukrainian missile attack on Luhansk, the capital of Russian-controlled Luhansk region, eastern Ukraine. Photo / AP
Emergency Ministry employees work at the side of a damaged apartment building following Friday's Ukrainian missile attack on Luhansk, the capital of Russian-controlled Luhansk region, eastern Ukraine. Photo / AP
Russian state news agency Tass cited Saldo as saying that Ukrainian forces first struck the town with a French-made guided bomb, then attacked again with a US-supplied HIMARS missile. He said Ukrainian forces had “deliberately made a repeat strike to create greater numbers of casualties” when “residents of nearby houses ran out to help the injured.”
Officials declared Saturday a day of mourning in Luhansk, and public events will be similarly cancelled in Kherson.
Further east, Leonid Pasechnik, the Russian-installed governor in Ukraine’s partially occupied Luhansk region, said Saturday that two more bodies had been pulled from the rubble following Friday’s Ukrainian missile attack on the regional capital, also called Luhansk. Russian state news agency Interfax cited regional authorities as saying this brought the death toll to six. Pasechnik also said 60 people were wounded in the attack.
Meanwhile, drone attacks between Russia and Ukraine persisted.
Emergency Ministry employees carry a wounded person from the side of the damaged apartment building following Friday's Ukrainian missile attack on Luhansk, the capital of Russian-controlled Luhansk region, eastern Ukraine. Photo / AP
Ukraine launched a barrage of drones across Russian territory overnight Friday, Russia’s Defense Ministry said Saturday. Twenty-five drones were reportedly destroyed over Russia’s southern Kuban and Astrakhan regions, the western Tula region, and the Moscow-annexed Crimean peninsula.
On Saturday morning, officials said air defences for the first time shot down Ukrainian drones over the North Ossetia region in the North Caucasus, some 900km east of the front line in Ukraine’s partially occupied Zaporizhzhia region.
Russia’s Ministry of Defense said that one drone had been destroyed, whereas regional Gov. Sergei Menyailo reported three downed drones over the region. Menyailo said that the target was a military airfield.
Ukrainian air defence overnight shot down nine out of 13 Russian drones over the central Poltava region, southeastern Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions, and the Kharkiv region in the northeast, Ukraine’s air force said.
Dnipropetrovsk regional Gov. Serhiy Lysak said the overnight drone attack damaged commercial and residential buildings.
A Ukrainian military spokesman said Ukraine now controlled more than half of the town of Vovchansk, a flashpoint for fighting since Russia launched a renewed offensive in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region last month.
“Most of the city is under the control of the defence forces,” Nazar Voloshin, spokesman for the Khortytsia ground forces formation, said on Ukrainian state TV.
It wasn’t immediately possible to independently confirm the claim.
Ukrainian officials said there was an attempt on the life of the ex-mayor of Kupiansk, a city in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region, on Friday.
The Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense said Hennadiy Matsehora was in “critical condition” after he was attacked in Russia’s Belgorod region, bordering Ukraine.
Officials said he “voluntarily agreed to full co-operation” when Russian troops invaded and in June 2022 “signed the so-called protocol for the creation of the occupation Kharkiv administration.”
After the Ukrainian Armed Forces took back control of Kupiansk, Matsehora had “escaped with the Russians to the Belgorod region,” Ukrainian intelligence said.
The statement by the directorate on social messaging app Telegram labelled the ex-mayor a “traitor.”
