The President of Ukraine, Volodimir Zelensky, has published a video on Wednesday showing what he claims is a Russian missile hitting an apartment building in the city of Zaporizhia, in the southeast of the country, hours after Russia launched an explosive drone attack in which four people have died in a student residence near Kyiv.
Just a few hours earlier, the Prime Minister of Japan, Fumio Kishida, left the Ukrainian capital after a visit in support of the country. Also today, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has left Moscow after discussing with Russian President Vladimir Putin his proposal to end the war, which has been rejected by the West as impossible.
The video posted by Zelensky appears to be a CCTV recording capturing the moment a missile hits a nine-story residential block off a busy street. An attack on which the number of victims is unknown.
However, Vladimir Rogov, an official of the Moscow-appointed regional administration for the Russian-occupied part of the Zaporizhia region, disassociated Moscow from what happened, saying that the building had been hit by a Ukrainian air defense missile launched to intercept a Russian missile, without citing any evidence to back up his claim.
Russia has denied firing on residential areas despite artillery and missile strikes hitting apartment buildings and civilian infrastructure on a daily basis. Russian authorities have blamed Ukrainian air defenses for some of the deadliest attacks on apartment buildings in the past, claiming that deploying defense systems in residential areas puts civilians at risk.
Separately, an overnight drone strike partially destroyed a secondary school and two dormitories in the town of Rzhyshchiv, south of the Ukrainian capital, local officials said. It was not clear how many people were in the dormitories at the time, though more than 20 people were hospitalized and several are missing.
Ukrainian air defenses shot down 16 of 21 drones launched by Russia, the Ukrainian General Staff said. Eight of them were shot down near the capital, according to the city’s military administration.
Other drone strikes hit the central-western province of Khmelnytskyi.
Russian drone bombing and other nighttime attacks that hit civilian infrastructure drew a scathing response from President Volodymyr Zelensky, a day after Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed China’s proposals to negotiate an end to the war. “Over 20 Iranian killer drones, more missiles, numerous bombings, and that’s just in the last night of Russian terror,” he wrote. “Every time someone tries to listen to the word ‘peace’ in Moscow, another order is given there for criminal attacks,” the Ukrainian president said.
