Russian forces launched strikes against the city of Odesa and its surrounding port infrastructure on Saturday, July 18, damaging civilian facilities and hitting a foreign commercial vessel.
Strikes on Odesa port and foreign vessels
Local military administration officials reported that the attack on the city of Odesa damaged infrastructure and resulted in an unspecified number of casualties.
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Odesa Regional Military Administration Head Oleh Kiper confirmed that a coordinated strike targeted the region’s port infrastructure, hitting a commercial vessel flying the flag of Antigua and Barbuda in the Black Sea. The attack killed one person and injured three others.
The strike destroyed buildings, reservoirs, and warehouses. Kiper stated that Russian forces launched a secondary strike as emergency crews were responding to the initial attack. The follow-up strike damaged specialized rescue equipment, but no personnel were injured.
The attack on the Antigua and Barbuda-flagged ship marks the second incident involving a foreign vessel in the region within 24 hours. On Friday evening, Russian forces executed a missile strike on the Odesa port, damaging a civilian vessel flying the flag of the Marshall Islands.
The strike hit the ship’s superstructure and ignited a fire, injuring four members of the 17-person crew, who received medical assistance on site.
Civilian casualties in Kherson and Dnipropetrovsk regions
The attacks in Odesa follow a series of Russian strikes across southern and central Ukraine.
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On the morning of July 18, a Russian drone attacked a civilian vehicle in the Korabelnyi district of Kherson. The Kherson Regional Military Administration reported that the strike injured five individuals, including a 14-year-old boy. The victims, which included two men and two women, sustained blast injuries, closed craniocerebral trauma, and concussions.
In the Dnipropetrovsk region on Friday, Russian forces struck a bus belonging to an agricultural company with a first-person view (FPV) drone in the city of Marhanets. The bus was transporting employees home from work. A 48-year-old man was killed at the scene, and eight other individuals were hospitalized with injuries.
Additionally, a humanitarian warehouse operated by the UN World Food Programme (WFP) in the city of Dnipro was targeted by Russian drones four times within a 24-hour period on Friday. No staff members were injured, but the facility sustained structural damage. Richard Ragan, the WFP representative in Ukraine, stated that this is the seventh instance in three months where clearly marked WFP facilities or vehicles have been struck by drones.
Earlier strikes in Kharkiv and Chernihiv
These attacks follow earlier strikes on July 17 across the Kharkiv and Chernihiv regions that resulted in one civilian death and at least 21 injuries, including eight children.
In Kharkiv, a missile strike on the Shevchenkivskyi district killed a 40-year-old man and injured nine others, damaging an educational institution, an administrative building, and commercial infrastructure.
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