Deadly missile blast at medical unit after new Russian strikes

AT least one person was killed and 15 injured when a medical facility was hit today in a wave of Russian missile strikes across Ukraine.

Rescue work was under way after the attack on a clinic in the city of Dnipro in the east of the country, president Volodymyr Zelensky said.

“Russian terrorists once again confirm their status of fighters against everything humane and honest,” he wrote on the Telegram messaging app, under video footage of a badly-damaged building with smoke pouring out of it.

Regional governor Serhiy Lysak said there were “victims” in the attack on the medical unit.

“It was a very difficult night. It was loud — the enemy launched a mass attack on the region with missiles and drones,” he added. Ukraine shot down 10 missiles and over 20 drones in overnight attacks on Kyiv, Dnipro and other targets and eastern regions, officials said. Several drones and missiles hit targets in the Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions, they added.

Officials in Kyiv said the roof of a shopping mall, a private house and several cars had been damaged after missiles and drones were shot down. President Zelensky’s office said that a fire had broken out on the outskirts of Kharkiv after an oil depot was hit twice, and equipment for pumping oil was damaged.

Meanwhile there were reports that Ukraine hit a Russian missile store in an occupied part of Ukraine using British-made Storm Shadows. Pictures were said to show an enormous fireball erupting after the reported strike on an arsenal of Russian S-300 air defence missiles in the occupied port of Berdiansk in the southern part of the country. Russia claimed Ukraine struck two regions in southern Russia with a rocket and a drone, though it claimed the rocket was shot down by air defences. In the southern Russian city of Krasnodar, a blast damaged a residential and office building, authorities said. They did not say what caused the blast, though Russian media said it was a drone attack.

Yesterday Russia moved ahead with a plan to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, whose leader said the warheads were already on the move, in the Kremlin’s first deployment of such weapons outside Russia since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union.

The US State Department denounced the deployment plan, but said Washington had no intention of altering its position on strategic nuclear weapons or had seen any signs Russia was preparing to use a nuclear weapon.