The death toll in the Russian attack with ballistic missiles and drones on Friday against Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, rose to 19, including nine children, Mayor Oleksandr Vilkul said on Telegram.
The attack on a residential part of Ukrainian Central City, hometown of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, damaged 34 apartments, as well as shops, commercial facilities and cars, said the mayor. The victims were only three years old.
At least 68 people were injured, including 40 who were hospitalized. Rescue operations were completed at night.
The deadly attack occurs at a time when Ukraine’s European allies are asking Russian President Vladimir Putin, who immediately responds to a US proposal from a partial ceasefire that Kiev accepted without conditions.
US authorities are increasingly frustrated by Russia’s slowness in US -led efforts to end their three -year war.
The Russian Ministry of Defense, in a rare comment about an attack within Ukraine, said in a statement that it hit “military commanders and western instructors” gathered in a restaurant.
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Earlier, on Friday, at least five people were killed and 34 were injured in a drone attack on Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine.
Ukraine’s air defense said it knocked down 51 of 92 drones at night, with damages reported in the regions of Dnipropetrovsk, Kiev, Zhyton and Sumy. A Russian drone also hit the thermoelectric plant in Kherson on Friday, Zelenskiy said.
“Russians know exactly what they are getting right. They know that these are energy facilities that should be protected from attacks under what Russia itself promised the American side,” Zelenskiy said in an X post.
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The Russian Ministry of Defense said its forces overthrew 49 Ukrainian drones in nine regions. A production installation was shot in Saransk, in the Mordovian region, about 700 kilometers from the Ukrainian border, his governor said, without providing further details. The Telegram Baza channel said the attack was on a large fiber optic factory, causing a fire.
Power lines were damaged in a drone attack in the Russian region of Belgorod, the region’s governor said.
Separately, the governor of the Russian region of Samara – about 1,000 km from Ukraine – reported that an unspecified industrial company was hit by drones, causing a fire but without death. Unconfirmed posts on social networks have shown a series of explosions in the area.
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Amid the attacks, some of Kiev’s leading western allies are in contact with Russia, in the face of its delay in the negotiations conducted by Washington. Moscow has “changed” by continuing to attack Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, despite an agreement reached last month to interrupt such attacks, France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said at an OTAN meeting of Foreign Affairs Ministers in Brussels.
Having promised to reach a quick end for Europe’s worst conflict since World War II, US President Donald Trump said last weekend that he was “very angry” with Putin. He later countered the criticism and said he believed that the Russian leader will “fulfill his part of the agreement.”
Kremlin denied media reports on Friday that Putin and Trump plan a telephone conversation within days.
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