Russian artillery and aerial strikes across Ukraine killed at least nine people on Tuesday, officials said, including a child. At the same time, Ukrainian drone strikes on the Russian mainland and Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine killed five people, including a child.
The latest exchanges form part of an intensification of long-range drone and missile attacks on infrastructure as Kyiv pushes for an Easter ceasefire; Orthodox Easter is observed at the end of the week.
What happened in Ukraine?
Russian forces struck the southern city of Kherson, where Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said four people were killed and several wounded, calling the shelling “hell.”
On the frontline in Nikopol, on the banks of the Dnipro river in Dnipropetrovsk region, a Russian drone attacked a passenger bus, killing four people. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the strike as “deliberate terror” against people in Nikopol and nearby communities. The attack ripped a yellow minibus open in a city that once had about 100,000 inhabitants before Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion. Russian ground forces continue operations aiming to advance in the Dnipropetrovsk area.
A separate bus was hit in another drone attack in Dnipropetrovsk region, leaving five people injured, Governor Oleksandr Ganzha said. Russian drone attacks on civilian vehicles and public transport in and near Dnipro have become more frequent.
Overnight, a separate Russian drone strike in Dnipropetrovsk killed an 11-year-old boy and wounded five others, the governor reported.
Ukrainian drone strikes in Russia and occupied areas
In the Russian mainland and occupied Ukrainian territories, Ukrainian drone strikes killed five civilians, including a 12-year-old boy and his two parents in the Vladimir region east of Moscow.
In Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia, a drone struck a school in the village of Velikaya Znamenka. Yevgeny Balitsky, the Moscow-backed governor, said a local official was killed while helping children escape and that five children were among six people injured.
In Russian-controlled Kherson, a Ukrainian drone strike killed a woman in her fifties, Moscow-backed governor Vladimir Saldo stated.
Separately, the Ukrainian military said it had struck the Ust-Luga oil terminal in Russia. Kyiv has stepped up attacks on Russia’s oil infrastructure amid concerns that an energy crisis triggered by the US-Israeli war on Iran could help revive Moscow’s fuel industry after years of sanctions.
Edited by: Wesley Rahn