Ukraine and Russia launched drone and missile strikes on cities either side of their shared border on Wednesday, as Moscow repeated unsubstantiated claims that Kyiv and the West were behind the massacre perpetrated at a concert hall in the city at the weekend.
At least one person was killed and 16 injured in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv when a Russian bomb hit an apartment block and damaged a nearby hospital, local officials said, adding that rescue crews were searching for people trapped in the rubble.
The bomb struck shortly after Russian officials said one person was hurt when a Ukrainian drone hit an administrative building in Belgorod, 80km across the border from Kharkiv. Local reports said the building was the city’s interior ministry headquarters. Russia said it shot down 18 missiles over the Belgorod region earlier on Wednesday.
Two people were also killed in artillery and drone strikes on the southeastern Ukrainian cities of Nikopol and Kherson, as Dmytro Kuleba, the country’s foreign minister, reiterated a call for western powers to deliver more air defence systems.
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“The peculiarity of the current Russian attacks is the intensive use of ballistic missiles that can reach targets at extremely high speeds, leaving little time for people to take cover and causing significant destruction,” he said. “Patriot and other similar systems are defensive by definition. They are designed to protect lives, not take them.”
Seven people were injured in Kyiv earlier this week by debris falling from what Ukraine said were two of Russia’s most advanced Zircon missiles, which were intercepted over the city with barely any warning from its air-raid sirens.
The strike came amid an intense wave of missile and drone attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, which crippled 50 per cent of the production capacity of the country’s main power firm, Dtek, put the country’s biggest hydroelectric power plant out of action and caused long blackouts in many cities, including Kharkiv.
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Thirty-nine winners of Nobel Prizes for peace, science, literature and economics urged world leaders on Wednesday to “drastically increase assistance to Ukraine”, support opponents of Russian president Vladimir Putin and “delegitimise Putin’s illegal hold on power” by refusing to recognise his win in predetermined elections this month.
“We call on world leaders and all people of goodwill to shed any illusions about Mr Putin and his criminal regime. History teaches us that appeasing the aggressor means encouraging further crimes against humanity... Through collective action, we can contribute to bringing peace to Europe and preventing a global catastrophe,” they said.
Russian officials said the death toll from the massacre at Crocus City Hall in a Moscow suburb last Friday had risen to 140, as the Kremlin continued to claim – without offering evidence – that Ukraine and its western allies were behind the killings, claimed by the Islamic State group, also known as Isis.
Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said it was “extremely hard to believe” that Islamic State could conduct the deadliest terror attack on Russian soil in 20 years.
“The very fact that within the first 24 hours... the Americans started screaming that it wasn’t Ukraine, I think, is a piece of incriminating evidence,” she said. “The second fact to note concerns the clamour by the US that this assuredly was the work of Isis... The speed with which they could [conclude this] is astonishing.”
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