Explosions rocked the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv on Saturday, the mayor said, at the end of a week in which Russian missiles have slammed into an apartment block and a shopping mall in other cities, killing dozens of people.
Air raid sirens sounded in the Mykolaiv region, which borders the vital Black Sea port of Odesa.
“There are powerful explosions in the city! Stay in shelters!” Mykolaiv mayor Oleksandr Senkevych wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
The cause of the blasts was not immediately clear, although Russia said on Saturday it had hit army command posts in the area. Reuters could not independently verify the reports.
Kyiv says Moscow has intensified missile attacks on targets far from the frontline and that it has deliberately hit civilian sites while Russian forces have been grinding out gains on the battlefield in the east, pummelling urban areas with artillery.
Russia says it has been aiming at military sites and denies taking aim at civilians. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said “Russian Armed Forces do not work with civilian targets”.
An apartment block was partly flattened in Odesa on Friday, which the authorities said killed at least 21 people, after Monday’s strike on a shopping mall in the central city of Kremenchuk that officials said left at least 19 dead.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy denounced the strikes in his nightly video address on Friday as “conscious, deliberately targeted Russian terror and not some sort of error or a coincidental missile strike”.
Russia’s defence ministry said on Saturday it had destroyed Ukrainian army posts in Mykolaiv and the eastern Donbas region with high-precision weapons and hit other military-related sites in the southern Zaporizhzhia region and Kharkiv to the north, Russian news agencies reported.
Thousands of civilians have been killed since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24 in what Moscow calls a “special military operation” to root out nationalists. Ukraine and its Western allies say it is an unprovoked war of aggression.
