At least eight civilians were killed and nearly eighty injured in overnight Russian airstrikes on the Ukrainian capital Kiev and Kharkiv (east), local authorities said on Tuesday.
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In recent weeks, Kiev and Moscow have accused each other of carrying out increasing attacks on civilian areas, sometimes with very high casualties, while the situation on the front is almost frozen.
“The death toll in Kharkiv stands at seven,” said regional governor Oleg Synegoubov, who previously said 51 people were injured.
According to regional leader Serguii Lyssak, another person was killed in an attack in Pavlograd, Dnipropetrovsk region, which also left one person injured.
On Tuesday morning, emergency services in Kharkiv evacuated injured residents, some of whom had bloody faces or had to be carried, an AFP photographer noted.
Firefighters battled flames in the rubble of a stricken building while a rescue team tried to find survivors.
Interior Minister Igor Klymenko said 27 people were rescued from the rubble in Kharkiv.
A local resident, Oleksandra Terekhovitch, told AFP that she fled into a corridor when she heard a first explosion nearby and then a second “in a neighboring house.”
“There are no more tears to shed” over the nearly two-year war, she said. “We live with the terror within us.”
“Annoy”
Twenty-two people were injured in Kiev, the capital's mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said, adding that “13 were hospitalized, including three children.”
According to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, one person is in a “state of clinical death,” but authorities in the capital have not yet confirmed the death.
According to the same source, a building and vehicles burned in the Sviatochynsky district of Kiev. In the same neighborhood, the unexploded warhead of a rocket was found in an apartment.
A fire broke out in a “non-residential building” in the Pechersk district.
Daryna Bodenchouk, a 17-year-old student interviewed by AFP near a damaged building in the capital, said she was “upset”.
“It's very scary,” she said, explaining that a window was broken in her dorm room.
Three more people were injured by rocket fragments in the Kiev region, said the head of the military administration, Ruslan Kravchenko.
Parallel to these nighttime attacks, a Russian attack killed a 70-year-old man in the southern city of Kherson, said Oleksandr Prokudin, the region's governor.
Attacks in Russia
According to the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, Valery Zaluzhny, Russia targeted Ukraine with 41 missiles, 21 of which were shot down.
Ukraine is urgently demanding more air defense resources from its Western allies and has set a goal of regaining control of the skies over its territory by 2024.
It also increased its own missile and drone attacks on Russian territory this winter, particularly targeting the city of Belgorod.
The Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, said it voted on Tuesday on a text appealing to the UN and parliaments around the world regarding Ukraine's “criminal attacks” against civilians on Russian territory.
Moscow also once again denied hitting civilians in Tuesday's bombings, claiming, as it has done for two years, that they only hit military targets.
French diplomacy accused Moscow of “deliberately” attacking civilian infrastructure.
The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) said it had noted the damage of these attacks on a school, a kindergarten and residential areas, for example in Kharkiv, where a five-story building was apparently damaged by several rockets.
Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians have been killed since Russia's invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022.
However, there is no reliable assessment, no side publishes detailed data and no independent organization, including the UN, is able to provide an exhaustive count of the dead and injured.