One Dead, Several Missing in Russian Attack on East Ukraine

Ukraine said Thursday that one person was dead and several more were missing after simultaneous Russian strikes on three towns in the eastern Donetsk region.

The industrial region has seen some of the fiercest fighting of Russia’s nearly two-year invasion, with the Kremlin claiming to have annexed it last year.

Russian forces fired six S-300 rockets on Pokrovsk, Novogrodivka and Myrnograd, officials in Kyiv said before local authorities announced the fatality.

“At the site of the shelling of a residential building in Novogrodivka, the body of a dead man was recovered from the rubble,” Igor Moroz, the acting head of the Donetsk region, said.

He said emergency workers were still searching for four people trapped under the debris, including one child. Kyiv earlier said 10 people had been injured in the attacks.

“The search and rescue operation is ongoing,” he said in a statement on social media.

In Pokrovsk, Interior Minister Igor Klymenko said a six-month-old baby had been wounded alongside boys of 13 and 16.

“One of the shells exploded in the yard of a house where a family with two children lived. As a result of the shelling, the roof and walls of the house were destroyed, and the family was buried under the rubble,” he added.

Some of the most intense fighting of recent weeks has been playing out east of the three villages in the frontline town of Avdiivka.

Russian forces and their proxies have controlled large swathes of the Donetsk region since 2014, when large-scale pro-democracy protests in Ukraine led to a separatist conflict in the east.

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