In yesterday's Russian attack at least 12 people died and another 43 were injured in front of a hypermarket for construction materials full of customers in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, the prosecutor's office of Ukraine announced today, quoted by Reuters, BTA writes.
The agency said the death toll was rising in the country's second-largest city, which is still trying to deal with the aftermath of two other Russian attacks a day earlier.
Two Russian guided bombs hit the construction hypermarket "Epicenter" yesterday afternoon, regional governor Oleg Sinegubov said on national television.
The impacts caused a massive fire, sending a huge column of thick, black smoke hundreds of meters into the air.
According to the local prosecutor's office, the bodies of ten of the 12 victims have not yet been identified.
The mayor of Kharkiv, Igor Terekhov, said that at the time of the Russian attack, there were about 120 people in the hypermarket.
"The attack was directed against a shopping center where there were many people - this is obviously terrorism," said Terekhov.
Ukraine's Minister of Internal Affairs Igor Klimenko wrote in "Telegram" that 16 people are still missing after last night's attack in Kharkiv.
Over the past week, the number of airstrikes has increased as Russian troops surged across the border, opening a new front north of the city, Reuters notes.
Russia shelled Kharkiv, less than 30 km from its border, throughout the war and in 2022 reached its outskirts in a failed attempt to capture it.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called on Ukraine's Western allies to help bolster the country's air defenses to keep its cities safe. French President Emmanuel Macron condemned in a post on the social platform "X" yesterday's attack on the hypermarket as "unacceptable".
Another Russian missile strike early last night targeted a residential area in the center of Kharkiv, which has a population of around 1.3 million. The number of those injured by it today rose to at least 25 people.
The Russian missile carved a crater several meters deep in the pavement at the foot of the building, which also houses a post office, beauty salon and cafe.
Ambulance workers have evacuated the residents of the nearby residential buildings. The faces of some of the wounded were bloodied.
On the other side near the border, the governor of Russia's Belgorod region, located next to Ukraine, Vyacheslav Gladkov, announced that four local residents had died in yesterday's Ukrainian attacks.