At least three people have been killed during a night of intense air raids and shelling as Russian and Ukrainian forces escalated their attacks following a strike by Kyiv on a Russian tanker in the Black Sea.
The attacks late on Saturday came as senior officials from 40 countries – including China, India and the United States – held talks in Saudi Arabia on how to end the war in Ukraine.
A final declaration is not expected from the two-day meeting.
Ukrainian officials blamed Russia for the attack on a blood centre in the eastern town of Kupiansk late on Saturday, while Moscow-installed officials accused Kyiv of a deadly shelling attack on the Russian-controlled Donetsk region.
Two people were killed and four more were wounded in the attack on Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region, said the head of the local regional military administration, Oleh Syniehubov.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian forces used a “guided aerial bomb” and described the attack as a “war crime”.
A woman in her eighties was also killed by Ukrainian shelling in Russian-held Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, the city’s Moscow-appointed mayor Alexei Kulemzin said.
The attack also set a university building in the area ablaze, according to the Moscow-installed governor of Donetsk.
Russia’s emergency situations ministry said that the blaze caused the building’s roof to collapse, but that there were no casualties.
The attacks were the latest in a day that had seen Moscow’s forces hit a Ukrainian aeronautics facility and Kyiv’s forces damage a Russian tanker in the Black Sea.
The aeronautics facility belonged to Motor Sich, a maker of plane and helicopter engines as well as other components. The site is located near the city of Khmelnytskyi in western Ukraine, about 300km (186 miles) southwest of Kyiv.
Source : aljazeera
