A Russian missile barrage across Ukraine wounded at least 34 people in one eastern city, just hours before an explosion inside Russia derailed a freight train.
The attack on Pavlohrad was part of the second wave of nationwide long-range missile strikes in three days, an apparent revival of a tactic that Moscow used throughout the winter – often targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.
A huge crater had been blasted in the back garden of a house that was strewn with debris on Pavlohrad’s outskirts. Homes nearby were badly damaged. In the city centre, the windows of a dormitory that serves a chemical plant had been blown out.
“I ran outside and saw the garage was destroyed. Everything was on fire, glass shards were everywhere. Had we been outside, we would have been killed,” resident Olha Lytvynenko, 61, said.
Viktoriia Suprun, 41, said she had taken cover with her daughter in the hallway of the dormitory. “We rushed to the hallway, lay on the floor. And then the explosion wave twisted the door. Had we stayed for five more seconds, we would have been trapped here,” she said. “We didn’t sleep at night and in the morning. My child will need psychological help, it is horrible.”
Mykola Lukashuk, head of the Dnipropetrovsk region council, said the attack had damaged 19 apartment blocks, 25 houses, three schools, three nurseries and a number of shops. The 34 wounded included five children, officials said. Russia’s Defence Ministry said in a statement that its forces had struck using high-precision long-range air and sea-based missiles against “Ukraine’s military-industrial facilities”.
“The work of enterprises making ammunition, weapons and military equipment for Ukrainian troops has been disrupted,” the statement said.
In Russia’s Bryansk region, which borders northern Ukraine, a freight train was derailed by an explosive device, regional governor Alexander Bogomaz said. There were no immediate indications of who set off the explosive but Bryansk has suffered sporadic cross-border shelling during the war and in March two people were reported killed in what Bryansk officials claimed was an incursion by Ukrainian saboteurs.
Damage from the latest Russian missile assault appeared to be limited elsewhere in Ukraine, after air raid sirens sounded for hours through the night and into the early hours of the morning. Ukraine’s military said it had shot down 15 of 18 incoming cruise missiles. The head of Kyiv’s city administration, Serhii Popko, said all missiles fired at the city were shot down, as well as some drones.
The latest missile assault follows a similar barrage involving more than 20 cruise missiles and two explosive drones on Friday. It was the first such large-scale attack on Kyiv in almost two months. In that attack, Russian missiles hit an apartment building in Uman, about 135 miles (215km) south of Kyiv, killing more than 20 people, including several children.
The latest attacks have damaged Ukraine’s power network infrastructure, which will take several days to repair, according to energy minister Herman Haluschenko. He said that nearly 20,000 people in the city of Kherson – in southern Ukraine – and the wider region had been left without power, along with an unspecified number of people in the Dnipropetrovsk region, including the city of Dnipro.
Over the weekend, two Ukrainian drones hit a Russian oil depot in Crimea in the latest attack on the peninsula that Russia illegally annexed in 2014. The Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview last week that his country will seek to reclaim the peninsula in a long-expected counteroffensive that Kyiv is making final preparations for.
The fighting on the ground in Ukraine has become a grinding war of attrition, a picture that Kyiv is hoping to change with its offensive, backed by Western-supplied weapons. Some of the bloodiest fighting has been in the eastern Donetsk region, where Russia is struggling to encircle the city of Bakhmut in the face of dogged Ukrainian defence.
Troops from the Wagner mercenary group and other forces are fighting Ukrainian troops house-to-house to try to gain control of what has become known as the “road of life” – the last remaining road west still in Ukrainian hands – which makes it critical for supplies and fresh troops.
Ukrainian counterattacks have ousted Russian forces from some positions in the besieged eastern city of Bakhmut. “The situation is quite difficult,” said Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi, the commander of Ukrainian ground forces, in a statement on Telegram. “At the same time, in certain parts of the city, the enemy was counterattacked by our units and left some positions,” he said while visiting frontline troops on Sunday.
New Russian units, including paratroopers and fighters from the Wagner mercenary group, are being “constantly thrown into battle” despite taking heavy losses, he said, adding: “But the enemy is unable to take control of the city.”
The head of the Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said in a video posted on his Telegram channel on Monday that his fighters needed some 300 tonnes of artillery shells a day for the assault on Bakhmut but were receiving only a third of that amount. “Three hundred tonnes a day is 10 cargo containers – not a lot at all,” said Mr Prigozhin, a Putin ally who has often clashed with Russia’s defence establishment over the course of the war.
Ukraine said on Monday its forces had repelled more than 36 enemy attacks on the part of the eastern frontline that stretches from Bakhmut to Maryinka, just west of Donetsk. Col Gen Syrskyi said that Russia continued to exert “maximum effort” to take the city but that it so far had failed.
Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report
