Ukraine Says at Least 18 Civilians Are Killed in Strikes
Europe|Ukraine Says at Least 18 Civilians Are Killed in Strikes
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/world/europe/ukraine-russia-civilians-killed.html
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At least 14 people were killed in the city of Poltava, Ukrainian officials said, blaming Russia. Four people were killed in Sudzha, a Russian town held by Ukraine, in a strike both countries blamed on each other.
The Ukrainian authorities said Sunday that two airstrikes a day earlier had killed at least 18 civilians, one of the highest single-day tolls so far this year and a grim reminder of the war’s enduring devastation as it approaches its fourth year.
The first strike occurred Saturday morning when a Russian missile hit a residential building in the Ukrainian city of Poltava, nearly 150 miles from the front lines, killing at least 14 people, including two children, according to local emergency services. Videos from the aftermath of the attack showed a section of the building reduced to rubble, with clothes and documents scattered across the area.
A few hours later, Ukrainian authorities said that a Russian bomb had smashed into a boarding school in Sudzha, a town in western Russia that is under Ukrainian control, killing four people.
The Russian Defense Ministry blamed Kyiv for the deadly strike in Sudzha and did not address the attack on Poltava. Neither side’s claims could be independently verified.
Ukrainian officials said that some 90 Russian civilians displaced by the nearby fighting had been sheltering in the school when the attack occurred. Oleksiy Dmytrashkivkyi, a military spokesman in the area, said in text messages that four of those people had been killed and 10 injured.
“They destroyed the building even though dozens of civilians were there,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said Saturday night in a social media post, emphasizing that those were Russia’s “own civilians.” He shared images of the ruins and of people covered in dust, visibly shaken by the attack.