KYIV: Ukraine on Saturday mourned 18 people, including nine children, killed in a Russian ballistic missile strike on President Volodymyr Zelensky’s home city of Kryvyi Rig, as the region’s governor said it was “the kind of pain you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.”
Sixty-one people were wounded, 12 of them children, Dnipropetrovsk governor Sergiy Lysak said after emergency operations were completed overnight.
The missile attack on Friday, one of the deadliest in recent weeks, struck a residential area near a children’s playground, said Oleksandr Vilkul, the head of Kryvyi Rig’s military administration.
“On 7, 8 and 9 April, days of mourning will be declared in Kryvyi Rig for those killed as a result of yesterday’s terrorist attacks on our city by the killer country,” he said.
“Children, families, the elderly... Ballistic missile and shakedown attacks on residential areas and playgrounds... This is nothing less than a mass murder of civilians.”
Pictures circulated by rescue services showed several bodies, one stretched out near a playground swing.
“This is the kind of pain you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy,” Lysak said.
Russia’s defense ministry said it “delivered a precision strike with a high-explosive missile on a restaurant” in the city “where commanders of formations and Western instructors were meeting.”
It said its air defense units had intercepted and destroyed 49 Ukrainian drones overnight.
The commander of the Ukrainian army retorted that Moscow was “trying to cover up its cynical crime” and “spreading false information” about the target of the strike.
He accused Russia of “war crimes.”
The Ukrainian air force said on Saturday Russia had launched 92 drones across Ukraine overnight.
Fifty one had been shot down and around 30 others had landed without causing damage.
US President Donald Trump, who said during his re-election campaign he could end the three-year conflict within days, is pushing the two sides to agree a ceasefire but his administration has failed to broker an accord acceptable to both.
Zelensky said the missile attack showed Russia had no interest in stopping its full-scale invasion, launched in February 2022.
“There is only one reason why this continues — Russia does not want a ceasefire and we see it. The whole world sees it,” he said.
“The missile struck an area near residential buildings, a playground and ordinary streets.
“People who are capable of that kind of thing aren’t human, They are bastards,” Zelensky said.
Zelensky on Friday met the heads of the British and French military in Kyiv to discuss a plan by London and Paris to send a “reassurance” force to Ukraine if and when a peace deal is reached.
This is one of the latest efforts by European leaders to agree a coordinated policy after Trump sidelined them and opened direct talks with the Kremlin.
“Together, we want to guarantee a lasting and solid peace in Ukraine, an essential condition for the security of the European continent,” Thierry Burkhard, chief of the French defense staff, said on X on Saturday.
Burkhard and his British counterpart, Tony Radakin, also met their Ukrainian counterpart Oleksandr Syrsky and Defense Minister Rustem Umerov.
Kryvyi Rig, in Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region, is about 60 kilometers (37 miles) from the front line, and has regularly been targeted by Russian drones and missiles.
Zelensky was born in the industrial city, which had a pre-war population of around 600,000 people.
Ukraine mourns 18 killed in Russian missile strike
https://arab.news/vkv3e
Ukraine mourns 18 killed in Russian missile strike
- Sixty-one people were wounded, 12 of them children, Dnipropetrovsk governor Sergiy Lysak said
Bomb attacks on Thailand petrol stations injure 4: army
- Authorities did not announce any arrests or say who may be behind the attacks
BANGKOK: Assailants detonated bombs at nearly a dozen petrol stations in Thailand’s south early Sunday, injuring four people, the army said, the latest attacks in the insurgency-hit region.
A low-level conflict since 2004 has killed thousands of people as rebels in the Muslim-majority region bordering Malaysia battle for greater autonomy.
Several bombs exploded within a 40-minute period after midnight on Sunday, igniting 11 petrol stations across Thailand’s southernmost provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala, an army statement said.
Authorities did not announce any arrests or say who may be behind the attacks.
“It happened almost at the same time. A group of an unknown number of men came and detonated bombs which damaged fuel pumps,” Narathiwat Governor Boonchauy Homyamyen told local media, adding that one police officer was injured in the province.
A firefighter and two petrol station employees were injured in Pattani province, the army said.
All four were admitted to hospitals, none with serious injuries, a Thai army spokesman told AFP.
Thailand’s Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul told reporters that security agencies believed the attacks were a “signal” timed with elections for local administrators taking place on Sunday, and “not aimed at insurgency.”
The army’s commander in the south, Narathip Phoynok, told reporters he ordered security measures raised to the “maximum level in all areas” including at road checkpoints and borders.
The nation’s deep south is culturally distinct from the rest of Buddhist-majority Thailand, which took control of the region more than a century ago.
The area is heavily policed by Thai security forces — the usual targets of insurgent attacks.
