A day of mourning has been declared in Ukraine’s southeastern Zaporizhzhia region after a Russian missile attack on the city of Vilniansk killed seven people on Saturday, Zaporizhzhia Governor Ivan Fedorov announced on Telegram.
Three of those killed in Saturday’s attack were children, according to Ukraine’s State Emergency Service, which also specified that in addition to the seven dead, a further 38 people had been injured.
Vilniansk is a city of around 14,000 people in the northern, Ukrainian–controlled part of the Zaporizhzhia region. While Russian forces currently occupy the south of the region, its capital Zaporizhzhia and the surrounding area remain under Ukrainian control.
The State Emergency Service said that Russia had struck the city centre just before 6pm local time on Saturday, and that over 50 emergency service workers had been deployed to extinguish the resulting fires.
Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin said that prosecutors and investigators were working at the scene following the dual missile strike and emphasised that the only way to stop Russian attacks was to “strengthen Ukraine with weapons and air defence”.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky echoed Kostin’s call, noting that Russia had carried out over 800 aerial attacks on “everything that makes life normal” in Ukraine over the past week alone, and that the country needed “clear decisions” from its partners to be able to protect itself from Russian missiles.
“Ukraine needs the necessary means to destroy the carriers of these bombs, including Russian combat aircraft, wherever they are. This step is essential”, Zelensky said.
The attack came the same day that authorities in Russia’s western Kursk region reported that five people had been killed in a Ukrainian drone strike on the border village of Gorodishche.
Russia’s Defence Ministry did not comment on the attack on Vilniansk, saying instead that it had struck a railway site used by Ukrainian forces to unload arms and military equipment in the village of Ukrainka less than 10 km away.