Russian forces also struck Lutsk, in northwest Ukraine; Ivano-Frankivsk in the southwest; and Dnipro in central Ukraine, where missiles landed near a kindergarten, an apartment building and a two-story shoe factory, which broke out in flames, according to the Ukrainian military.
Across Ukraine, at least 564 civilians have been killed and 982 have been injured by Russian forces that have used heavy artillery, rockets and widely banned cluster munitions in populated areas, the United Nations said.
“Schools, hospitals and kindergartens have been hit, with hugely devastating consequences,” Liz Throssell, a spokeswoman for the United Nations human rights office, said in Geneva.
Russian forces have attacked at least 26 hospitals and health care facilities, the United Nations said. Those strikes have killed 12 people, including two health care workers, and injured 34, eight of them medical workers, Tarik Jasarevic, a spokesman for the World Health Organization, told reporters by video link from Lviv in western Ukraine.
The mayor of Melitopol, a small southeastern city that was one of the first to fall to the Russians, was kidnapped by Russian forces on Friday, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky, who called it “a sign of the weakness of the invaders.”
The war has left hundreds of thousands of civilians in dire conditions in besieged cities as food runs low, clean water supplies dry up and access to medical care becomes scarce. More than 2.5 million Ukrainians have fled the country in the fastest-growing exodus of European refugees since World War II, according to the United Nations.
