Three people were killed and nine others were injured after a Russian missile struck a residential area of the city of Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine, Ukrainian officials said on Thursday.
The attack on Wednesday hit the city’s largest district, Shevchenkivskyi, which the city council’s website describes as being “mostly bedroom.” A church building and several local shops were destroyed, and the windows were blown out of several high-rise buildings, the head of the regional military administration, Yuri Malashko, said on the Telegram messaging app on Wednesday evening.
The Russian missile struck around 8 p.m., after a day of air-raid warnings across the country prompted by a Ukrainian Air Force warning that a MiG-31K jet had taken off from a Russian air base. The jets are capable of carrying hypersonic Kinzhal missiles, also known as Daggers, some of the most sophisticated conventional weapons in Russia’s arsenal.
“All of Ukraine is a missile hazard!” the air force warned, asking residents not to ignore the alarms.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine shared images of the attack on Zaporizhzhia in an online post, adding that the rescue operation was underway and that Russia would “face its sentence.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Reuters reported that a senior adviser to Mr. Zelensky, Mykhailo Podolyak, denied Russian accusations that Kyiv tried to carry out a drone attack against the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear complex, which lies around a bend of the Dnipro River just south of the city.
In Nikopol, a city to the northwest across the river from the nuclear plant, an 18-year-old died after Russian shelling struck the city, according to state administrators. Farther to the southwest, in the city of Kherson, a 16-year-old girl died more than a week after she was injured in shelling attacks, the region’s governor said on Wednesday.
