LVIV, Ukraine – After an airstrike leveled a shopping mall in central Ukraine this week, attention has once again turned to the massive human cost of fighting far from the battlefield.
But across the country, civilian deaths are also increasing day by day in smaller-scale attacks that have claimed the lives of a small number of people. Even in cities and towns far from the fiercest of the war, civilian casualties continued to mount.
Vitaly Kim, governor of the Mykolaiv region in southern Ukraine, said at a press conference on Wednesday: “They will probably attack military structures, but mainly civilian infrastructure. “I think they are trying to scare the locals and demoralize our military.”
Russian officials have repeatedly defended their actions in Ukraine, saying their attacks are focused on military infrastructure, but they increasingly destroy civilian sites.
Kim said on Wednesday at least four people were killed in an early morning rocket attack in Mykolaiv, following a frontal attack on a five-story apartment building, according to local authorities. .
Five others were injured in the attack, and a search and rescue operation is underway. A day earlier, shelling in the nearby city of Ochakiv killed three people, including a six-year-old girl. A 3-month-old infant is also fighting for life in the hospital.
Kim said of the situation of 250,000 civilians in Mykolaiv: “It is not safe at all, noting that safety has decreased significantly in the past three weeks. “We cannot calculate where the enemy might strike. They don’t follow any fighting standards, and they always hit civilian subjects. “
On Wednesday morning, rescuers were also digging through rubble in the city of Dnipro, central Ukraine, where rockets hit a gas station and an industrial complex a day earlier.
Mykola Lukashuk, head of the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Council, said in a post on Telegram application where two rockets hit the city on Tuesday. One damaged dozens of cars and the area around gas stations and auto repair shops, the other damaged several structures at the industrial complex.
“The State Emergency Service of Ukraine is currently carrying out rescue operations, dismantling debris and searching for survivors,” Lukashuk wrote.
According to Dmytro Zhyvytskyi, the governor of the region, two people were killed and three others injured as a result of Russian shelling on communities in the Sumy region of northeastern Ukraine on Tuesday. And one person was killed in shelling in Donetsk, local officials said.
Two civilians were killed and at least six others injured in attacks in the Kharkiv area, when shells hit a residential building and a business. Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, is 25 km from the Russian border. However, the regional governor, Oleh Synehubov, said there were no plans to evacuate civilians yet.
“We believe that such an evacuation will only be necessary if the city of Kharkiv is being hit by a storm,” Synehubov said in an interview broadcast on Ukrainian television.
