Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has promised justice after seven people including a 22-day-old baby were killed in Russian shelling on Sunday.
At least 22 more people were wounded in the missile attack on Ukraine’s southern region of Kherson on Sunday, prompting local officials to declare Monday a day of mourning.
Five people in the village of Shyroka Balka were among those killed, including the 22-day-old girl, her 12-year-old brother who died from serious injuries in hospital, and their 39-year-old mother, Olesia.
Two people, including the pastor of a church, were killed in the neighbouring village of Stanislav, according to Governor Oleksandr Prokudin.
Mr Zelensky condemned the “brutal” attack during his nightly video address on Sunday.
He said that by 6pm there had been 17 reports of shelling in Kherson region alone on Sunday, as well as incidents in the regions of Mykolaiv, Zaporizhzhia, Donbas, Kharkiv, and in border areas in northeast Ukraine.
“There is no day when Russian evil does not receive our entirely just response,” he said in his nightly video address.
He named past Russian targets - including occupiers, equipment, depots, and the Kerch Bridge linking occupied Crimea with Russia that his domestic intelligence agency recently acknowledged sabotaging last October - as “evidence that we will not leave any of Russia’s crimes unanswered.”
Three people each in Kherson city and the town of Beryslav were wounded, according to the interior ministry, and casualties were also reported in five other settlements across the region.
Kyiv reclaimed part of Kherson from Russian occupation last November but Kremlin troops have continued shelling the regional capital and areas around it from across the Dnipro River.
“The terrorists will never willingly stop killing civilians,” Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko wrote in a Telegram post. “The terrorists must be stopped. With force. They don’t understand anything else.”
“Today the Kherson region shuddered from terrible news. Kherson, Veletenske, Zolota Balka, Stanislav, Komyshany, Shyroka Balka...” Mr Prokudin wrote on Telegram, listing the settlements hit in Sunday’s attacks.
Later in the evening, the local Kherson government said a new air strike and artillery shelling had injured a 31-year-old woman and a man and damaged at least 12 houses in the town of Bilozerka. In a Telegram post, it said three guided aerial bombs had damaged several houses in the village of Odradokamianka.
Ukraine’s military launched a counteroffensive in June to reclaim Russian-occupied territory across the southeast but has not made any significant attempts to cross the Dnipro to reach the other side of the Kherson region.
The attack on Kherson province followed Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar’s remarks on Saturday where she moved to deny rumours that Ukrainian forces had landed on the occupied left (east) bank of the Dnipro in the Kherson region.
Ukraine‘s military launched a counteroffensive in June to reclaim Russian-occupied territory across the southeast but has not made any significant attempts to cross the Dnipro to reach the other side of the Kherson region.
Thousands were evacuated from the region after a river breach which Ukraine claimed was caused by the Russians blowing up the Kakhovka dam in June.
This created a humanitarian crisis with homes washed away and the population facing unsanitary conditions and disease.
Elsewhere, Ukrainian military officials said on Saturday evening that Kyiv’s forces had made progress in the south, claiming some success near a key village in the southern Zaporizhzhia region and capturing other unspecified territories.
Ukraine’s General Staff said they had “partial success” around the tactically important Robotyne area in the Zaporizhzhia region, a key Russian stronghold that Ukraine needs to retake in order to continue pushing south towards Melitopol.
“There are liberated territories. The defence forces are working,” General Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, commander of Ukraine’s southern forces, said of the southern front.
