Russian strikes on Ukraine – including on an aid centre, a hospice and a hospital – have killed at least 38 civilians and injured scores of others across Ukraine over the last 24 hours. At least 33 people are known to have died in a glide bomb attack in the southern Zaporizhzhia region on Monday night, and President Volodymyr Zelensky said the number of victims was set to rise as more than 50 people could be trapped under the rubble. He called the strike in Komyshuvakha village "one of the largest mass killings committed by Russia during this war".
Ukraine had proposed to extend and expand last week's ceasefire in the Kherson region which allowed people from the frontline Russian-occupied town of Oleshky to evacuate, Zelensky added. The attack on a school building being used as an aid distribution centre in Komyshuvakha was Moscow's response, he said. Elsewhere, a hospice was attacked in the central city of Dnipro and a hospital was hit in the north-eastern city of Kharkiv, where Zelensky said 73 people were wounded, most of them elderly patients.
Nine 3,000kg aerial bombs hit Komyshuvakha as residents were gathering to receive humanitarian aid at a distribution centre, authorities said. Local media reported that when the attack began, people took refuge underground but the roof collapsed, trapping many underneath. "The scale of the tragedy is difficult to comprehend," regional head Mykhailo Semikin said.
Russia's defense ministry said the attack had targeted Ukrainian military units and killed 25 servicemen. However, there was no credible evidence that the site was being used by the Ukrainian military and there were no major military or industrial facilities in the settlement of Komyshuvakha, reports BBC News Russian defence correspondent Ilya Abishev. The village is to the south-east of the city of Zaporizhzhia, which has come under constant Russian bombardment.
According to Abishev, Komyshuvakha is of high military importance as part of Ukraine's defensive and transport network on the approaches to the regional capital. But the UN's human rights monitoring mission said the distribution of humanitarian aid at the local school had been highly publicised and the attack "seems to have violated the most fundamental principles of international humanitarian law", external. Further north, in Dnipro, nearly 50 terminally ill patients were being transferred to other facilities after their hospice was destroyed by a Russian missile on Monday night.
The oldest of the patients was 90 years old. Mayor Boris Filatov posted photos on Telegram showing elderly people lying in their beds in a hospice room with blown-out windows and rubble and broken glass strewn on the floors. "I realise that I am violating ethics," wrote Filatov.
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