The Ukrainian-held front-line city has been at the heart of fierce fighting as Moscow and Kyiv push for battlefield breakthroughs amid the looming onset of wintry conditions.
ADVERTISEMENTAt least six people were killed and 14 injured late on Saturday by Russian missile attacks on a postal depot in the Kharkiv region in northeastern Ukraine, local officials have reported.
14 people in hospital, seven 'critical'
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy shared a video on social media of what appears to be a badly damaged warehouse next to debris and a container bearing the logo of Ukrainian postal operator Nova Poshta.
Zelenskyy described the strike as an attack on an “ordinary civilian object.”
“We need to respond to Russian terror every day with results on the front line. And, even more so, we need to strengthen global unity in order to fight against this terror,” he wrote on the social media platform X.
“Russia will not be able to achieve anything through terror and murder. The end result for all terrorists is the same: the need to face responsibility for what they have done.”
Ruslan Vragov, the medical director of the hospital said, "Since they are in an extremely serious condition, they are under observation, and we are waiting, if necessary, when we can take them to the operating room again. For some people, the lungs, intestines, stomach, liver and spleen were affected."
"The six people killed and 14 injured in the attack by the occupiers were employees of the company who were inside the Nova Poshta terminal,” the governor of the Kharkiv region, Oleg Sinegoubov said.
"The victims, aged 19 to 42, were injured by shrapnel and blast (from the explosions)," he added.
Ukrainian authorities say Russian forces in the Belgorod region bordering Ukraine fired S-300 missiles - and two of them hit the warehouse.
“Analysis of the debris continues at the scene in order to establish the exact number of injured and dead,” they told the state media company Suspilne.
Elsewhere in the Kharkiv region, local authorities reported three people wounded in Russian shelling on the city of Kupiansk.
Strikes over the rest of Ukraine
Officials in southern Ukraine said Sunday the Russian military had used a record number of aerial bombs over the country’s Kherson region in the previous 24 hours.
Natalia Humeniuk, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian military’s Operational Command South, said that 36 missiles had been recorded over the area, with some villages being hit by several strikes.
Ukrainian officials also reported Sunday that two people had been killed by Russian shelling in the Donetsk region. A 58-year-old man in the village of Kalinovka died in his home, while a 61-year-old man was killed in the town of Vasiukovka from a direct hit to his car, according to the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office.
Meanwhile, Moscow-appointed officials said that they had intercepted three Ukrainian missiles headed toward Russian-occupied Crimea. Vladimir Saldo, the Kremlin-installed leader of the Russian-occupied portion of Ukraine’s Kherson region, said all three missiles had been shot down.