No fewer than 14 people have so far been confirmed dead after seven Russian missiles struck the industrial town of Zaporizhzhia in southern Ukraine, the town council’s secretary announced yesterday night.
Africa Daily News, New York gathered that the missiles struck before dawn on Friday, with three landing just around the town centre, just 40 kilometres (25 miles) from the artillery battles of the southern front.
‘Sad news keeps coming to us from the analysis of the buildings hit during the attack,’ said Anatoly Kurtev via Telegram.
‘For now the number of dead has gone up to 14.’
The first official toll from the missile strikes had been one dead and seven wounded. The emergency services lifted the toll to 11 dead on Friday.
A five-story residential building on the main street was almost razed to the ground.
President Volodymyr Zelensky lashed out on Telegram saying Zaporizhzhia “is subjected to massive rocket attacks every day … (it’s a) deliberate crime”.
The Ukrainian-controlled city is located in the eponymous Zaporizhzhia region, also home to the Russian-occupied nuclear plant that has been the site of heavy shelling.
Moscow claims to have annexed the region even though its forces do not control all of it.
Ukraine said at least 30 people were killed last week when a convoy of civilian cars in the Zaporizhzhia region was shelled in an attack Kyiv blamed on Moscow.
The Ukrainian-controlled city is located in the eponymous Zaporizhzhia region, also home to the Russian-occupied nuclear plant that has been the site of heavy shelling.
Reports have revealed that some of the presidents of some of the nine NATO countries which are located in the central and eastern Europe had declared on Sunday they would never recognise the recent annexation by Russia of Ukrainian territory.
Their reaction is also coming two days after the Russian President Vladimir Putin had signed some of the treaty documents to annex four Moscow-occupied regions of Ukraine — Donetsk, Kherson, Lugansk, and Zaporizhzhia — following “referendums” the West has dismissed as ‘sham’.
The presidents issued a joint statement saying they could not ‘stay quiet in the face of the blatant violation of international law by the Russian Federation over the annexation.
