KYIV: Eight people were killed and 27 wounded in a Russian missile strike on port infrastructure in Odesa, southern Ukraine, late on Friday, Ukraine’s Emergency Service said.
Some of the wounded were on a bus at the epicenter of the strike, the service said in a Telegram post Saturday. Trucks caught fire in the parking lot and cars were also damaged.
The port was struck with ballistic missiles, said Oleh Kiper, the head of the Odesa region.
Moscow did not immediately acknowledge reports of the deadly attack. The Russian Defense Ministry said on Saturday morning that over the previous day, it had struck unspecified “transport and storage infrastructure used by the Ukrainian Armed Forces,” along with energy facilities and those supplying Kyiv’s war effort.
Elsewhere, Ukrainian drones hit a Russian warship, oil rig and other facilities, Ukraine’s General Staff said in a statement Saturday.
The nighttime attack on Friday hit the Russian warship “Okhotnik,” according to the statement posted to the Telegram messaging app.
The ship was patrolling in the Caspian Sea near an oil and gas production platform. The extent of the damage is still being clarified, the statement added.
A drilling platform at the Filanovsky oil and gas field in the Caspian Sea was also hit. The facility is operated by Russian oil giant Lukoil. Ukrainian drones also struck a radar system in the Krasnosilske area of Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
There was no immediate comment from the Russian government or Lukoil. The company is one of two Russian oil majors — alongside state-owned Gazprom — targeted by recent US sanctions that aim to deprive Moscow of oil export revenue that helps it sustain the war.
Kyiv has used similar arguments to justify months of long-range strikes on Russian oil infrastructure, which it says both funds and directly fuels the Kremlin’s all-out invasion, soon to enter its fifth year.