Kharkiv attack: Bodies of 44 civilians found in rubble of bombed building, Ukraine says
The bodies of 44 civilians have been found in the rubble of a building destroyed in a Russian attack in March, a Ukrainian official has said.
The five-story building in Izyum in the Kharkiv region collapsed after being bombed, Oleh Synehubov, the head of Kharkiv's regional administration, said on Tuesday on social media.
He wrote: “This is another horrible war crime of the Russian occupiers against the civilian population!”
He added the building had collapsed with the civilians inside but did not give details on the specific location of the building.
Details of the deaths emerged as the vital Black Sea port of Odesa came under repeated Russian missile attack, including from some hypersonic missiles. The Ukrainian military said Russian forces fired seven missiles from the air at Odesa on Monday night, hitting a shopping centre and a warehouse. One person was killed and five were wounded, the military said.
As part of the barrage, a Russian supersonic bomber fired three hypersonic missiles, according to the Center for Defense Strategies, a Ukrainian think tank tracking the war. The organisation identified the weapons used as Kinzhal, or "Dagger," hypersonic air-to-surface missiles. Hypersonic missiles travel at five times the speed of sound.
Video footage from the scene showed fire and rescue workers combing through piles of rubble dousing still smoking wreckage. Ukrainian emergency services said all the fires set off by the strikes were extinguished early on Tuesday.
Ukraine and its allies have been trying to find a way to unblock ports or provide alternate routes for exporting its significant crops of grain, wheat and corn.
Air raid sirens could also be heard across several regions of Ukraine early on Tuesday including Luhansk, Kharkiv and Dnipro.
Serhiy Gaidai, the governor of Luhansk, said the region was attacked 22 times over 24 hours.
“During the day on May 9th, the Russians fired en masse on all possible routes out of the region.”
Ukraine has been braced for an increase in attacks around Russia’s annual Victory Parade, where president Vladimir Putin claimed Russians they were again fighting “Nazis”.
“You are fighting for the Motherland, for its future, so that no one forgets the lessons of World War Two. So that there is no place in the world for executioners, castigators and Nazis,” Mr Putin said.
Meanwhile, an aide to the mayor of Mariupol said on Tuesday that at least 100 civilians were still trapped in Avozstal steel works despite indications from Ukraine that all civilians had left the plant and Russia declaring the evacuation was complete.
“In addition to the military, at least 100 civilians remain in the shelters. However, this does not reduce the density of attacks by the occupiers,” Mariupol mayoral aide Petro Andryushchenko wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
