The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has renewed his calls for more air defences and long-range weapons after a missile attack in southern Ukraine killed seven people including two children.
Ukrainian officials released photos showing bodies covered with picnic blankets in a park in Vilniansk, a town near the south-eastern city of Zaporizhzhia, alongside deep craters in the scorched earth and the charred remains of a nearby building.
“Our cities and communities suffer from such Russian strikes daily,” Zelenskiy wrote on the Telegram message app after the strike on Vilniansk.
“Ukraine needs the necessary forces and resources to destroy the carriers of these bombs … Clear decisions are needed to protect our people. Long-distance strikes and modern air defences are crucial to halting daily Russian terror,” he added.
Since March, Russian forces have used a new type of guided bomb to pound Ukrainian cities and villages across the country. Zelenskiy on Sunday said Moscow has used more than 800 guided aerial bombs against Ukraine this week alone.
Ukraine has at least four Patriot air defence systems, provided by the US and Germany. Since Zelenskiy made repeated pleas for additional defence weapons, Germany, the Netherlands, Romania and the US have each pledged to send Kyiv a Patriot system.
In total, at least 15 civilians were killed and more than 37 injured in missile attacks on the east and the south of Ukraine on Saturday and overnight.
At least eight civilians lost their lives on Saturday in the eastern Donetsk region, which has been severely damaged by ongoing fighting, according to the local governor, Vadym Filashkin. Much of the province continues to experience near-daily shelling.
During a visit to Kurakhovo on Saturday, a city in the Donetsk region six miles from the frontlines, the Guardian reported one glide bomb and at least five artillery strikes on civilian buildings, which killed one person and injured several others.
Local officials also reported that a Russian strike targeted a coalmine in the nearby town of Selydove, destroying several production facilities. The attack temporarily trapped 53 miners, who were subsequently evacuated.
While the west’s decisions to allow Ukraine to strike Russian territory with its weaponry have halted Russia’s push along the north-east front near Kharkiv, Moscow remains on the offensive in the east.
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The Russian defence ministry on Sunday said its troops had captured the villages of Spirne and Novooleksandrivka in the Donetsk region. Deepstate, an open-source Ukrainian analysis group, a day earlier also said that Russian troops had made small gains in several directions in the east.
Moscow seems intent on exploiting a strategic opportunity before Ukraine receives new military aid from the west, including F-16 fighter jets and tens of thousands of artillery shells through a Czech initiative.
In an attempt to bolster morale among Ukrainian troops, Zelenskiy last week made an unannounced visit to Donetsk.
He travelled to the region alongside Brig Gen Andriy Hnatov, the newly appointed commander of the joint forces who replaced an unpopular general whom some soldiers had accused of causing significant casualties in the war with Russia.