A Russian missile hit a shopping centre in the eastern Ukrainian town of Kostiantynivka in the frontline Donetsk region on Friday, killing at least 14 people and injuring 43 others, Ukrainian officials said. Heavy black smoke clouds rose from the destroyed building in images and videos posted by officials. The interior minister later said the blaze was put out. “Russian terrorists hit an ordinary supermarket and a post office,” said Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. “There are people under the rubble.” Emergency services continued working amid the rubble looking for survivors.
“No situation on the battlefield can justify targeting civilians,” Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Andriy Kostin, said in an update on Kostiantynivka, which lies about 13km (eight miles) from the active combat line in Ukraine’s east. There was no immediate comment from Moscow. The Ukrainian regional governor, Vadym Filashkin, said Russia used a Kh-38 air-to-surface missile in the attack. Houses, shops and more than a dozen cars were also damaged. Nova Poshta, Ukraine’s largest private postal company, said its cargo office in the supermarket was damaged.
Ukrainian forces staged an overnight ambush on a Russian convoy 40km (25 miles) across the border in Russia’s Kursk province as the Kremlin declared a federal emergency over a four-day incursion that has badly damaged its credibility, Dan Sabbagh and Pjotr Sauer report. A video circulated by Russian military bloggers showed a destroyed convoy, with bodies visible inside some trucks, on the E38 east-west highway at Oktyabrskoe, a location far deeper inside Russia than any previously confirmed fighting since Ukraine’s forces crossed the border on Tuesday.
Russia’s defence ministry said on Friday it was sending rocket launchers, artillery, tanks and heavy trucks to reinforce its defences in the Kursk region, state media reported. About 1,000 Ukrainian troops and more than two dozen armoured vehicles and tanks were involved in the initial attack, Moscow said, though it later claimed to have destroyed many more pieces of equipment.
Moscow said it had struck Ukrainian positions on the western edge of Sudzha, a town about 8km from the border that appeared to be the focus of Kyiv’s offensive, Agence France-Presse reported. Russian media shared a video purporting to show Sudzha residents appealing to Vladimir Putin for help, warning that many were unable to evacuate. Thousands have been evacuated from the border region, with Russia putting on an extra train to Moscow from the regional capital, Kursk. At a train station in Moscow, AFP journalists saw families disembarking with children.
