The identity of a woman who was among five civilians and emergency workers critically injured in a “double tap” missile strike that killed seven people in the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk remains a mystery, the head of the regional hospital has said.
Serhiy Ryzhenko, the director of the Mechnikov hospital in Dnipro, 115 miles (185km) west of the struck city, said his surgeons had started working on the wounded from 3am on Tuesday but that the lives of four of the five most serious cases were still in the balance.
Of the five, two were said to be civilians, one was a police officer and two were first responders. But the identity of the only woman in the group could not be discerned as her personal belongings were said to have been shredded in the blast.
The Iskander missiles that hit Pokrovsk had been launched 40 minutes apart, known as a “double tap”, leading to death and injury among those who rushed to the scene, near a hotel used by journalists, after the first strike.
Ryzhenko, whose hospital deals with the most serious trauma cases, said: “Starting from 3am, we started receiving wounded from Pokrovsk. They had such severe injuries that we had to take them to the operating theatre immediately. It was a matter of life and death. One of the men [had missile fragments] that had gone very deep into the skull. Our neurosurgeons did their best for several hours to save this man.
“This man is now in a serious condition, but we all believe that he will survive. To be honest, 98% of people with such injuries die immediately.
“Of these five people, four are in very serious condition. They are in the polytrauma department in intensive care. They have problems with the fragments that have hit different parts of their bodies. There is a woman who is in a very serious condition, she has already received two litres of blood. We do not know her name and surname yet. Her condition is very serious.”
After the attack early on Monday evening, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said Moscow had struck an “ordinary residential building”, publishing footage of a typical Soviet-era five-storey building that had had its top floor destroyed.
A nearby hotel and a pizzeria used by correspondents were also damaged, though it is understood few journalists would have been there at the time because concerns about the risk of a strike on the city, which is close to the frontline, had been growing.
The interior minister, Ihor Klymenko, said seven people – five civilians, a rescuer and a soldier – had been killed.
It is the second time in recent weeks that facilities used by journalists have been hit in Russian strikes on Ukrainian cities. In June a pizza restaurant in the eastern city of Kramatorsk was bombed, killing the award-winning writer Victoria Amelina.
Ukrainian officials said two Iskander missiles struck Pokrovsk at 7.15pm and 7.52pm on Monday, damaging 12 multi-storey buildings. Eighty-one people were injured, including 39 civilians, 31 police officers, seven rescuers and four members of the military.
“We are resuming the demolition of rubble,” Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of the Donetsk region’s military administration, said on Tuesday morning after rescuers “were forced to suspend work for the night due to the high threat of repeated shelling”.
Pokrovsk lies 43 miles north-west of the city of Donetsk, held by Russia, and 30 miles from the frontline, and has been used as a base for many media organisations covering developments on the nearby frontlines.
The Druzhba hotel and the Corleone pizzeria, which were damaged in the strikes, were popular among journalists, correspondents from the BBC, Financial Times, Globe and Mail and Channel 4 News noted.
“We stayed at this hotel in May to report on the thousands returning to their homes close to the frontline. Five people killed & 31 injured. The risks are real and enduring,” James Waterhouse, the BBC’s Ukraine correspondent, wrote on Twitter after the attack.
The Financial Times correspondent Christopher Miller tweeted: “Russian forces launched a missile attack on central Pokrovsk city and Druzhba hotel and Corleone pizzeria, both of which were frequented by journalists, in a Kramatorsk-style attack.”
Maria Avdeeva, a security expert documenting Russian war crimes, tweeted: “Pizza place Corleone in Pokrovsk, a frequent spot for volunteers and foreign journalists, appears to be a target, much like Rio pizza in Kramatorsk.”
Meanwhile, the SBU, Ukraine’s secret service, claimed to have foiled Russian hacking of its armed forces’ combat information system.
“As a result of complex measures, SBU exposed and blocked the illegal actions of Russian hackers who tried to penetrate Ukrainian military networks and organise intelligence gathering,” Reuters reported the SBU as saying on the Telegram messaging app.
The SBU said hackers had tried to gain access to “sensitive information on the actions of the Ukrainian armed forces, the location and movement of the defence forces, their technical support”.
Later on Tuesday, the SBU said it had exposed a spy network of four local women in Pokrovsk allegedly providing Russia and the Wagner group with intelligence about the number of Ukrainian troops in the Donetsk region and the flight paths of military aircraft.
“The peculiarity of the enemy group was that it consisted exclusively of local women who supported the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine,” the SBU posted on Telegram.
Three women had been detained and the fourth was believed to have left Ukraine shortly after the start of the invasion to coordinate the intelligence gathering. It follows claims on Monday that a plot to assassinate Zelenskiy through an air assault during his visit to Mykolaiv had also been thwarted after the arrest of a female “traitor”.
