Russian forces fired missiles and shells at cities and towns across Ukraine on Saturday after Russia's military announced it was stepping up its onslaught against its neighbor. Ukraine reported at least 17 more civilians killed.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu gave “instructions to further intensify the actions of units in all operational areas, in order to exclude the possibility of the Kyiv regime launching massive rocket and artillery strikes on civilian infrastructure and residents of settlements in the Donbas and other regions,” his ministry said Saturday.
Serhiy Bolvinov, the deputy head of the Kharkiv region's police force, said four missiles presumably fired from the Russian city of Belgorod hit an apartment building, a school and administrative buildings at about 3:30 a.m. Writing on Facebook, he said the three bodies were found under the rubble. In the embattled eastern Donetsk region, seven civilians were killed and 14 wounded in the last 24 hours in Russian attacks on cities, its governor said Saturday.
The Luhansk and Donetsk regions make up the Donbas, an eastern industrial region that used to power Ukraine's economy and has mostly been taken over by Russian and separatist forces. Two people were killed and a woman was hospitalized after a Russian rocket strike on the eastern riverside city of Nikopol, emergency services said. Dnipropetrovsk Gov. Valentyn Reznichenko said a five-story apartment block, a school and a vocational school building were damaged.
The deadliest Russian attack this week came Thursday, when a Russian missile strike killed at least 24 people - including three children - and wounded more than 200 in Vinnytsia, a city southwest of Kyiv, the capital, far from the front lines. Three of those missing after the attack were found alive in the rubble Saturday and one person remained missing, the emergency service said.
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