The Ukrainian authorities said on Sunday that two air strikes one day earlier had killed at least 18 civilians, one of the highest tolls of a day so far this year and a dark recall of the lasting devastation of war as approaching its fourth year.
The first strike occurred on Saturday morning when a Russian missile struck a residential building in the Ukrainian city of Poltava, nearly 150 miles from the front line lines, killing at least 14 people, including two children, according to services local emergency. Videos of the attack on the attack showed that a section of the building reduced in rubble, with clothes and documents dispersed in the region.
A few hours later, the Ukrainian authorities said that a Russian bomb had broken a boarding school in Sudzha, a city in western Russia under Ukrainian control, killing four people.
The Russian Defense Ministry blame Kyiv for the murderous strike in Sudzha and did not approach the attack on Poltava. None of the team’s claims could be verified independently.
Ukrainian officials said some 90 Russian civilians moved by nearby battles were sheltered at school when the attack occurred. Oleksiy Dmytrashkivkyi, a military spokesman in the region, said in SMS that four of these people had been killed and 10 injured.
“They destroyed the building even if dozens of civilians were there,” President VolodyMyr Zelensky, Ukraine said on Saturday evening Social media messagestressing that these were “own civilians” of Russia. He shared images of the ruins and people covered with dust, visibly shaken by the attack.
Sudzha, a small town near the Ukrainian border in the region of western Russia, was captured by the kyiv forces during a cross -border assault last summer and has since been occupied by Ukraine.
Saturday attacks – striking cities both and far from the front lines and killing people of the two nations at war – underlined the brutal assessment of the war against civilians. Since the start of the invasion of Russia almost three years ago, more than 12,300 civilians have been killed, a UN official reported Just before Christmas.
The United Nations noted a strong increase in victims last year due to the use of long -range drones, missiles and slip bombs capable of reaching distant targets. Cities formerly considered relatively safe – like Lviv, in western Ukraine and Poltava – are now faced with frequent attacks. In kyiv, the formerly rare buzz of Russian drones flying above the head now resonates regularly all night.
Denys Kliap, director of Free and Unbreakable, a volunteer emergency team in Poltava, said that he and his colleagues rushed to the attack website as soon as they heard explosions, finding a heap rubble and a residential fire building. “I heard incredible cries from people,” he recalls. “People groaned under the rubble, shouting for help.”
While getting closer to the remains of the building, Mr. Kliap, 26, fell on the torn body of a woman in the rubble. Inside, a colleague found another woman with an open injury, bleeding strongly. Other residents were in shock, he said.
Photographs Emergency services have shown that several floors of the building had collapsed. Some apartments were miraculously intact, their doors opening onto the vacuum left by a neighboring collapsed apartment. The clothes hung in the void, hanging on bars and steel cables.
On Sunday morning, Ukrainian emergency services were still looking through the rubble left by the missile strike the day before. They said they had saved 22 people. Mr. Kliap, speaking by phone from the site, said that relatives of residents found themselves there, hoping for survivors.
“But rescuers often only find corpses,” he said.
The strike in Poltava rekindled the memories of a previous attack, in September, on a military academy which killed 50 people, including many students. The Russian missiles had only struck the academy a few minutes after the alarms of air raid had to stealthily raised. “For the last year, the feeling of danger among the citizens of Poltava has increased,” said Mr. Kliap.
Ukrainian authorities have urged their Western partners to provide more missiles and air defense systems to protect Ukrainian cities. “We need better protection – air defense systems, long -range weapons and sanctions pressure,” said Zelensky said said SundayNote that last week, Russia launched nearly 50 missiles, 660 attack drones and more than 760 Glide bombs.
The Russian civilians also found themselves increasingly in danger because the battlefield has partially moved to Russia in regions like Kursk, where Ukrainian and Russian forces fought, and that Ukraine targets them military bases and oil installations in Russia.
Thousands of civilians have been taken at the start of the fighting, and many have stayed in the Ukrainian control zone since. While Russian forces have gradually advanced with assaults to recover their land, continuous battles have placed civilians in great danger.
Yurii Shyvala Contributed reports.
