The Russian army has returned to the offensive with missiles against Ukraineas part of a military conflict that has already lasted for almost five months.
On Thursday morning, Russian submarines stationed in the Black Sea fired four model cruise missiles Kalibr against Vinnytsia, a city 268 kilometers southwest of the capital kyiv, killing at least 23 people, including three children, and wounding more than 100, Ukrainian military authorities said.
In a television message, President Volodymyr Zelensky alleged that the attack deliberately targeted civilians in places of no military value. For his part, the governor of the Vinnytsia region, Serhiy Borzov, said that Ukrainian air defenses shot down two of the four Russian missiles that were launched.
The head of the National Police, Ihor Klymenko, quoted by the British channel SkyNews, detailed that so far only six bodies had been identified, while 39 people are still missing. Of the 65 people hospitalized, five remain in critical condition, while 34 suffered serious injuries, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service added.
“There was a building of a medical organization. When the first rocket hit it, my window panes shattered,” said Svitlana Kubas, 74, a resident of Vinnytsia. “And when the second wave came, it was so deafening that my head is still buzzing. She ripped the outermost door off the building, ripped it apart.”
In addition to hitting buildings, the missiles started a fire that encompassed 50 cars in a parking lot, authorities said. “These are pretty high-precision missiles… They knew where they were hitting,” Borzov told the agency. AP.
Moscow has not officially confirmed the attack, but Margarita Simonyan, director RTRussia’s state-controlled television network, said on its messaging app channel that it was told by military officials that a building in Vinnytsia was targeted because it housed Ukrainian “Nazis.”
The attack occurred as government officials from some 40 countries met in The Hague, the Netherlands, to discuss coordinating investigations and prosecutions for possible war crimes committed in Ukraine.
“Every day Russia is destroying the civilian population, killing Ukrainian children, directing missiles at civilian objects. Where there are no military (objectives). What is it but an open act of terrorism?” Zelensky wrote on his Telegram account.
Ukraine’s Interior Minister Denys Monastyrsky echoed Zelensky, calling the missile strike a “war crime” aimed at intimidating Ukrainians as the country’s forces hold out in the east.
The US embassy in kyiv issued another security alert Thursday night, urging all US citizens remaining in Ukraine to leave immediately. The alert, which appeared to be in response to the Vinnytsia attack, stated that large gatherings and organized events “may serve as Russian military targets anywhere in Ukraine, including its western regions.”
Vinnytsia is one of the largest cities in Ukraine, with a pre-war population of 370,000. Thousands of people from eastern Ukraine, where Moscow has concentrated its offensive, have fled there since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24.
