A Russian guided bomb attack on the southern Ukrainian town of Zaporizhzhia killed at least 13 civilians and injured around 30 others, officials said.
Graphic images posted on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Telegram page on Wednesday showed bloodied civilians lying on a city street being treated by emergency services.
“There is nothing more brutal than the aerial bombardment of a city, knowing that ordinary civilians will suffer,” Zelensky wrote on X.
High-rise residential buildings, an industrial facility and other infrastructure were damaged in the attack, the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine said on Telegram on Wednesday. The debris hit a tram and a bus with passengers inside, he added.
Regional Governor Ivan Fedorov said Russian forces launched guided bombs at a residential area of the city in mid-afternoon and at least two residential buildings were hit in the attack.
Moscow has frequently launched air attacks against civilian infrastructure during its nearly three-year war with Ukraine. He has always denied targeting civilians.
Al Jazeera’s Jonah Hull, reporting from Kharkiv in Ukraine, said “the strikes targeted what was described as an ‘industrial site’.”
Hull described “scenes of devastation outside a factory, in a multi-storey building opposite… in addition to the passage of a tram and a minibus, believed to be carrying passengers.”
Marina Miron, a military analyst at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera that “the factory had already been targeted in November, as the Russians claimed the Ukrainians were using it to assemble drones.”
“Due to the deaths of civilians, however, it is possible that Russian navigation systems were blocked,” Miron said.
The attack comes as Russia and Ukraine seek to project strength ahead of the inauguration of US President-elect Donald Trump on January 20.
Earlier in the day, Ukraine’s military said it had struck a fuel storage depot in Russia, causing a massive fire at a facility that supplies missiles to a Russian air base.
Ukraine’s General Staff said the assault hit a storage facility near Engels in Russia’s Saratov region, about 600 kilometers east of the Ukrainian border.
While Ukraine faces some restrictions in the use of Western-supplied missiles, kyiv is developing its own long-range arsenal, capable of hitting targets behind its front line.
The attacks disrupted Russian logistics in the war which began on February 24, 2022.
“Serious security guarantees”
Earlier on Wednesday, Zelensky said countries wanting to end the war should offer Ukraine assurances about its future defense.
“To be honest, I think we have the right to demand serious security guarantees from countries that aim for world peace,” Zelensky said.
The Ukrainian leader was speaking at a news conference in kyiv, responding to comments from U.S. President-elect Donald Trump that he understood Russia’s opposition to neighboring Ukraine’s NATO membership.
Speaking to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago estate during a wide-ranging news conference Tuesday evening, Trump said: “Russia has someone at their door, and I can understand his feelings on that. »
The United States, Germany, Hungary and Slovakia blocked Ukraine from immediately joining the 32-nation NATO alliance, Zelensky noted.
