On Friday evening, sirens of airstrikes sounded across Ukraine as the country prepared for another series of intensified long-range missile attacks on cities and towns across the country.
At least 37 people have been killed in missile attacks since Thursday that appear to have been targeted at occupied civilian areas and crowded buildings, a tactic Russia has repeatedly denied using.
The attacks came when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned that Russian society had been damaged for generations by the war.
Two people were killed Saturday amid heavy Russian bombing in the Ukrainian city of Nikopol, emergency services and the regional governor said. Rescuers recovered the bodies of two people from the rubble.
Dnipropetrovsk regional governor Valentyn Reznichenko said Russian forces had fired 53 Grad rockets at the city.
Social media users shared images showing rockets flying, black smoke coming out of buildings and cars burning in the southeastern city of Dnipro, the fourth largest city in the country with more than 1 million inhabitants, where at least three people were killed and 15. injured after a missile attack Friday afternoon.
“The rockets hit an industrial plant and a busy street next door,” Reznichenko said on his Facebook page.
The Russian Defense Ministry said on Saturday that the Russian armed forces had destroyed a factory in Dnipro that produced parts for Tochka-U ballistic missiles and shot down three Ukrainian planes and two helicopters.
A Russian attack hit the city of Chuhuiv, in northeastern Ukraine, in the Kharkiv area overnight, killing three people, including a 70-year-old woman, and injuring three more, the regional governor said.
The strike damaged a residential block, a school and a shop, and rescuers were passing through the rubble, Governor Oleh Synehubov told Telegram.
The governor of the central region of Ukraine from Poltava, Dmytro Lunin, confirmed the explosions in Kremenchuk.
Another missile was launched on the territory of southern Ukraine, according to the military governor of Odessa, Maxim Marchenko. The details of the victims and destruction were not yet known.
Eight people were killed and 13 were injured in the 10-site bombing in the eastern part of Donetsk, Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said in a television interview on Friday.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu ordered Russian military units operating in all areas of Ukraine to intensify their operations to prevent attacks in eastern Ukraine and other territories under Russian control, he said. Saturday the ministry in a statement on its website.
He said Shoigu “gave the necessary instructions to further increase the actions of the groups in all operational areas in order to exclude the possibility of the Kyiv regime launching massive rocket and artillery attacks on civilian infrastructure and residents of the settlements in the Donbas and other regions “.
The death toll from Thursday’s missile attack in Ukraine’s central city of Vinnytsia, a city of 370,000, rose to 24 on Saturday after a woman died in hospital from burns, an official said. Ukrainian.
On Friday, Russia claimed responsibility for the airstrike on Vinnytsia, far from the front in central Ukraine, which killed three children: a four-year-old girl named Liza Dmitrieva and two seven- and eight-year-old boys.
The Russian Defense Ministry claimed that the Ukrainian Air Force and “foreign arms suppliers” were meeting in the building, which Kyiv has denied.
In a video speech early Saturday, Zelenskiy said Ukraine would preserve “humanity and civilization” and vowed to rebuild the destroyed educational institutions.
“But Russian society, with so many murderers and executioners, will be paralyzed for generations, because of it.”
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Zelenskiy again called on the Ukrainians not to ignore the alarms of airstrikes.
A senior Ukrainian official has accused Russia of deliberately escalating its deadly attacks on civilian targets.
Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of the National Security Council of Ukraine, told The Guardian that the follow-up to the Russian attacks suggested that in recent weeks more emphasis has been placed on terrorizing the civilian population of Ukraine. “These are not my emotions, but what our follow-up is telling us.”