Russia strikes homes in region with nuke plant, detains refugees at border
Russian missiles hit apartment buildings in the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia on Thursday, killing at least seven people, with at least five others missing, in a region that Moscow has illegally annexed, a local official said. Two strikes damaged more than 40 buildings hours after Ukraine’s president announced that his military had retaken three more villages in another of the four regions annexed by Russia, Moscow’s latest battlefield reversal.
The Zaporizhzhia regional governor, Oleksandr Starukh, who provided the casualty figure, said more than 20 people were rescued from the multistory apartment buildings. Rescuers who earlier took a threeyear-old girl to a hospital continued to search the rubble early Friday. Starukh wrote on Telegram that Russian forces used S-300 missiles.
Russia has been reported to have converted the S-300 from its original use as a long-range anti-aircraft weapon into a missile for ground attacks because of a shortage of other, more suitable weapons.
“Absolute meanness. Absolute evil,” Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskky said of the attacks. “There have already been thousands of manifestations of such evil. Unfortunately, there may be thousands more.”
Zaporizhzhia is one of the four regions of Ukraine that Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed as Russian territory in violation of international laws. The region is home to a sprawling nuclear power plant under Russian occupation; the city of the same name remains under Ukrainian control.
Russian authorities detained several hundred Ukrainians trying to flee Russian-occupied areas Wednesday near the Russian-Estonian borderMost of the detained had fled through Russia and Crimea and were seeking to enter the EU.
Russian has forced thousands of Ukrainians into “filtration camps” to determine their loyalties. Zelenskyy said Thursday more than 1.6 million Ukrainians have been deported to Russia.