Video of the pre-dawn attack showed the charred remains of buildings in the small town of Serhiivka, about 50 kilometres southwest of Odesa. Ukrainian news reports said missiles struck a multi-storey apartment building and a resort area. “A terrorist country is killing our people. In response to defeats on the battlefield, they fight civilians,” said Andriy Yermak, chief of staff to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Ukraine’s Security Service said 19 people died, including two children. It said another 38, including six children and a pregnant woman, were hospitalized with injuries. Most of the victims were in the apartment building, Ukrainian emergency officials said. Firefighters remove debris at a damaged residential building in the town of Serhiivka, Ukraine, on Friday. (Nina Lyashonok/The Associated Press) A spokesperson for the Odesa regional government, Serhiy Bratchuk, said on the Telegram messaging app that another 30 had been injured. In eastern Ukraine, where Russia is pressing its main ground offensive, Ukrainian forces were holding on to the city of Lysychansk, although officials described it as under ferocious artillery attack.
Pullout from Snake Island
The airstrikes in Odesa followed the pullout of Russian forces from Snake Island on Thursday, a move that was expected to potentially ease the threat to nearby Odesa. The island sits along a busy shipping lane. Russia took control of it in the opening days of the war in the apparent hope of using it as a staging ground for an assault on Odesa. The Kremlin portrayed the pullout from Snake Island as a “goodwill gesture.” Ukraine’s military claimed a barrage of its artillery and missiles forced the Russians to flee in two small speedboats. The exact number of withdrawing troops was not disclosed. Russian bombardments killed large numbers of civilians earlier in the war, including at a hospital and a theatre in the port city of Mariupol. Mass casualties had appeared to become more infrequent as Moscow concentrated on capturing eastern Ukraine’s entire Donbas region. However, a missile strike Monday on a shopping mall in Kremenchuk, a city in central Ukraine, killed at least 19 people and injured another 62, authorities said Friday. Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday denied that Russian forces targeted the shopping mall, saying his country doesn’t hit civilian facilities. He claimed the target in Kremenchuk was a nearby weapons depot, echoing the remarks of his military officials.
Artillery assault
Russia has focused its main ground campaign on the east, where it demands Kyiv cede full control of two provinces to pro-Russian separatist proxies. Ukraine’s last bastion in the province of Luhansk is the city of Lysychansk across the Siverskyi Donets river, which is close to being encircled under relentless Russian artillery assault. The Russians were shelling Lysychansk from different directions and approaching from several sides, regional Gov. Serhiy Gaidai said on Ukrainian television. Local residents stand next to a damaged residential building in Serhiivka on Friday after Ukrainian officials said Russian missiles were launched. (Nina Lyashonok/The Associated Press)
