The death toll in a Russian artillery barrage that hit a market in the eastern Ukrainian town of Kurakhove has risen to 10, the Ukrainian authorities say, in an episode that has further stoked outrage in the country over Moscow’s invasion.
A brief video clip of the aftermath of the attack, which occurred on Wednesday, showed a street strewn with debris and glass, a fire in a market stall and at least one body lying near a wall. An ambulance and a fire truck arrived at the scene, sirens blaring.
The video was posted on the Telegram social messaging app by the military governor of Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko. It was later reposted on Telegram by President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. The New York Times verified the video’s location and timing.
“The Russian army carried out a very brutal, absolutely deliberate strike at Kurakhove. Precisely at civilians,” Mr. Zelensky said in an overnight speech, listing a gas station, a bus station, a residential building, as well as the market, among the targets hit. He said that many other people were wounded.
The United Nations says that at least 6,700 civilian deaths have been documented in the war, and Ukrainian officials said in late November that they had documented 8,300 people killed. Russia has regularly hit civilian targets across the country with missiles, drones and shells.
The Ukrainian prosecutor’s office, which has documented Russia’s attacks since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion nine months ago, said it had opened an investigation into the shelling.
There was no immediate comment from the Russian authorities, and it was not possible to confirm the attack independently. Moscow has previously said that its forces do not intentionally target civilians.
Russia’s full-scale invasion has been punctuated by a series of mass killings of civilians in shellfire. In April, more than 50 civilians who were fleeing fighting in Donetsk Province and had gathered at a train station in the city of Kramatorsk were killed. In July, cruise missiles hit a shopping center in the central city of Vinnytsia, killing at least 23 people, while in September, 30 people were killed when a convoy of cars leaving the city of Zaporizhzhia in southern Ukraine, was hit by shellfire.
Kurakhove lies in agricultural land just west of the capital of Donetsk Province. The province was one of four that Russia illegally annexed in late September, but it remains largely controlled by Ukraine.
Many civilians, responding to an evacuation request by the government, have left the province for safer parts of Ukraine or to go abroad, but others, including many older people, have remained. Both sides have been digging defenses in the Donbas since 2014, when Russian forces and pro-Russian separatists first seized territory.
The authorities in Russian-held parts of the Donbas regularly accuse Ukraine of launching deadly strikes and killing civilians in the territory they control.
They did so again on Monday. Leonid Pasechnik, the head of the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic, a pro-Moscow separatist government, said on Telegram that three people had been killed when Ukrainian forces shelled a hostel that housed construction workers in the town of Alchevsk, about 23 miles southwest of the regional capital.
Another pro-Russian local official, Andriy Marochko, said on Telegram that, in all, 10 people had been killed.
There was no comment on the reports from the Ukrainian authorities, and it was not possible to confirm the attack independently.
