A Russian strike on a prison in central Ukraine overnight killed more than 16 people and wounded dozens others, Kyiv said Monday, after Washington pressured Russia to end its war.
The attack comes around the three-year anniversary of an attack on another detention facility in occupied Ukrainian territory that Kyiv blamed on Moscow and that was reported to have killed dozens of captured Ukrainian soldiers.
It also comes just one day after US President Donald Trump issued Moscow with a new deadline to end its grinding invasion of Ukraine — now in its fourth year — or face tough new sanctions.
Russia carried out eight strikes on the Zaporizhzhia region, hitting the prison, according to Ivan Fedorov, the head of the military administration.
He said 16 people were killed there and that another 35 were wounded in the attack that he said destroyed the facility and damaged homes nearby.
“Putin’s regime, which also issues threats against the United States through some of its mouthpieces, must face economic and military blows that strip it of the capacity to wage war,” Andriy Yermak, a senior aide to Ukraine’s president wrote on social media in response.
Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said the Zaporizhzhia attack was further evidence of Russian “war crimes.”
“People held in places of detention do not lose their right to life and protection,” he wrote on social media.
The Ukrainian air force said that Russia had launched 37 drones and two missiles overnight, adding that its air defense systems had downed 32 of the drones only.
People were also killed and more wounded in attacks on the Dnipropetrovsk region, according to regional government officials.
A missile strike on the town of Kamyanske killed two people, wounded five and damaged a hospital, Sergiy Lysak, head of the regional military administration said on Telegram.
Another person was killed and several wounded in an attack on the region’s Synelnykivsky district, he said.
In a separate attack on Velykomykhaylivska, Monday night, a “75-year-old woman was killed. A 68-year-old man was wounded. A private house was damaged,” he posted on Telegram.
In southern Russia, a Ukrainian drone attack killed one person, the region’s acting governor said Tuesday.
“A car was damaged on Ostrovsky Street. Unfortunately, the driver who was in it died,” Yuri Slyusar, acting governor of the Rostov region, said in a post on Telegram.
Kyiv has been trying to repel Russia’s summer offensive, which has made fresh advances into areas largely spared since the start of the offensive in 2022.
Over the weekend, the Russian army said its forces had captured a small settlement in the industrial Dnipropetrovsk region, weeks after it seized the first village in the territory.
Kyiv has contested those claimed Russian advances.
Both Ukraine and Russia blamed each other for the strike over the night of July 29 three years ago on the detention in the Russian-occupied Donetsk region, which the Kremlin says is part of Russia.
Ukraine says that dozens of its soldiers who laid down their arms after a long Russian siege of the port city of Mariupol were killed in that attack on the Olenivka detention facility.
