Eleven killed and dozens wounded in Russian attack on civilian buildings in Volodymyr Zelenskyy's home town

13 June 2023, 15:32 | Updated: 13 June 2023, 15:34

Eleven people have been left dead and 28 have been injured in a Russian missile attack on Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy's home town.

Seven more people are feared to be trapped under the rubble of a five-storey residential building in Kryvyi Rih, after cruise missiles blew it up on Tuesday.

Four people died in an apartment block, with seven at warehouses.

Photos from the scene published by Mr Zelensky on his Telegram channel showed firefighters battling the blaze as the fire continued to rage in the wreckage. Burned-out vehicles littered the ground.

He wrote: "More terrorist missiles, Russian killers continue their war against residential buildings, ordinary cities and people. Unfortunately, there are dead and wounded.

"The rescue operation in Kryvyi Rih continues. My condolences to all those who have lost their loved ones! Terrorists will never be forgiven, and they will be held accountable for every missile they launch."

Kryvyi Rih is a city of about 600,000 people in the Dnipropetrovsk region, in south central Ukraine. The city has come under fire from Russian forces before in the war, which began in February 2022.

Meanwhile an oil refinery in the Russian region of Krasnodar also came under fire. The refinery is about 80 miles from the Ukrainian border and less than 100 miles from a mansion belonging to Vladimir Putin. Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for the attack.

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This is the latest instance of civilian bloodshed in Russia's invasion of Ukraine, as Ukrainian forces launch counter-offensive using Western-supplied firepower to try to drive out the Russians from the country.

The aerial assault was the latest barrage of strikes by Russian forces that targeted various parts of Ukraine overnight. That included Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, which was attacked with Iranian-made Shahed drones,

Local governor Oleh Syniehubov said the surrounding Kharkiv region was also shelled.

He reported that shelling wounded two civilians - a 33-year-old man and 44-year-old woman - in the town of Shevchenkove, south east of Kharkiv.

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The mayor of Kharkiv, Ihor Terekhov, separately reported that a drone strike damaged a utilities business and a warehouse in the city's north east.

The Kyiv military administration reported that the capital come under fire as well on Tuesday but the incoming missiles were destroyed by air defences.

A day earlier, Ukrainian deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar said the country's troops recaptured a total of seven villages spanning 90 square kilometres over the past week - small successes in the early phases of a counter-offensive.

Russian officials did not confirm those Ukrainian gains, which were impossible to verify and could be reversed in the to-and-fro of war.

The advance amounted to only small bits of territory and underscored the difficulty of the battle ahead for Ukrainian forces, who will have to fight metre by metre to regain the roughly one-fifth of their country under Russian occupation.