Russian forces fired missiles at the town of Vilniansk, outside the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, killing seven people and injuring 31 others on Saturday, officials said. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy repeated his appeal to allies to provide Ukraine with more long-range weapons and enhanced air defences to stop what he said were daily attacks on his country. The prosecutor general, Andriy Kostin, said two missiles were fired on the town in Ukraine’s south-east, damaging infrastructure, a shop and residential buildings. Emergency services put the death toll at seven, including two children, and said eight of the 31 injured were also children. Firefighters had put out blazes in several buildings and completed rescue operations.
Zaporizhzhia’s regional governor, Ivan Fedorov, said the Vilniansk strike was “yet another dreadful terrorist act against the civilian population”. It occurred in “the middle of the day, a non-working day, in the town centre, where people were out relaxing, where there were no military targets”, he said in a video posted on Telegram. Russia’s defence ministry said on Telegram its missiles had struck a nearby area in the Zaporizhzhia region where it said Ukrainian trains unloaded arms and military equipment, killing soldiers and destroying armoured vehicles and missiles. Neither side’s battlefield accounts could be independently verified.
Russian attacks on frontline villages in the Donetsk region in the east killed four people, Ukrainian officials said. Three were in the village of Zarichne, the region’s head, Vadym Filashkin, said on social media. Another person, a resident of the frontline village of New York, “also sustained fatal injuries”, Ukraine’s general prosecutor said later.
Ukrainian forces shelled parts of southern Russia’s Kursk region throughout Saturday after carrying out an overnight drone attack on a village which killed five people, including two children, the regional governor said. Alexei Smirnov posted on Telegram that the five fatalities occurred in a house in the village of Gorodishche, east of the regional centre of Kursk. Two family members were being treated in hospital. A video posted on Smirnov’s Telegram channel showed him at a destroyed house amid piles of rubble and building materials.
Ukraine and Russia said priests were among the dozens of captured soldiers and civilians they had exchanged earlier this week. Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Saturday that two Ukrainian Greek Catholic priests taken captive in Moscow-occupied Berdiansk were handed back to Ukraine thanks to the mediation of the Vatican. Russia said a high-ranking Ukrainian Orthodox cleric was handed over to Moscow along with two other priests. Moscow and Kyiv exchanged 90 prisoners of war and some civilians each earlier this week.
Rescuers in Dnipro said several residents remained missing after at least one person was killed and 12 wounded, including a seven-month-old girl, after a Russian strike destroyed the top four floors of the apartment block in central Ukraine on Friday evening.