Three dead in Russian drone strike on Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region

Three people were killed in a Russian drone strike on the town of Vilniansk in Ukraine’s southeastern Zaporizhzhia region in the early hours of Thursday morning, according to the State Emergency Service of Ukraine.

According to the regional authorities, the victims were a 62-year-old man, a 26-year-old woman and a 50-year-old woman. A further 16 people were injured in the strike, Zaporizhzhia military administration head Ivan Fedorov said, adding that Russia had carried out some 841 airstrikes on 34 populated areas of the Zaporizhzhia region in the past 24 hours.

Seven private houses were damaged in the attack, with one being completely destroyed. Rescue workers also extinguished a blaze in a residential building and a gas pipe that caught fire.

Russia also struck multiple other regions of Ukraine overnight on Wednesday, including the southern region of Odesa, where fires in several industrial facilities broke out, and the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, where two people were injured. 

The attacks came hours after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that the Russians were readying another massive assault on Ukraine and implored Kyiv’s allies to understand how “every single Russian strike” discredited Moscow’s claim to want a peace deal. 

Nevertheless, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday that control of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region after the war was the “one remaining item” blocking a peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv.