Two consecutive Russian attacks on a medical centre in the north-eastern Ukrainian city of Sumy killed at least nine people on Saturday morning, officials said.
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After the first strike killed one person, Russia attacked a second time whilst patients and staff were evacuating, Ukraine’s Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said.
Local officials in Sumy reported that Iranian-made Shahed drones were used in the attack. Eleven other people were wounded, the head of the Sumy City Military administration, Oleksii Drozdenko, said.
Sumy lies some 32 kilometres from Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukrainian troops have been deployed since Aug. 6 in a bid to divert the Kremlin’s military focus away from the front line in Ukraine.
Ukraine’s air force said it shot down 69 of 73 Russian drones launched overnight as well as two of the four missiles. City authorities in Kyiv said around 15 drones had been shot down over the Ukrainian capital and its outskirts.
In Kryvyi Rih, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s home city, local officials said on Saturday that a man’s body was found under the rubble of an administrative building hit by a Russian missile on Friday, bringing the death toll from that attack to four.
In Russia, the Defence Ministry said Saturday that air defences overnight had shot down four Ukrainian drones over the Belgorod region and one over the Kursk region, both areas bordering Ukraine.
One person was also killed when Ukraine shelled the Russian border city of Shebekino on Saturday, Belgorod regional Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov said. Two other people were wounded.