Ukrainian emergency services worked into the night Wednesday in Zaporizhzhia following a Russian-guided bomb strike in a busy area of the provincial capital that killed at least 13 people and injured 113. Photo by Oleg Movchaniuk/EPA/EFE
Jan. 9 (UPI) -- Russian forces bombed, shelled and deployed more than 200 attack drones in a wave of airborne assaults against targets across the eastern half of Ukraine, killing at least 19 people and injuring 132 over the past 24 hours, authorities said Thursday.
Most of the fatalities were in the frontline city of Zaporizhzhia where 13 civilians were killed and 113 injured on Wednesday afternoon after a guided aerial bomb hit a crowd outside an administrative building of an infrastructure facility and a busy road, Zaporizhzhia Gov. Ivan Federov said in a post on his Telegram account.
A 13-year-old child was among the injured of whom 59 were hospitalized -- 10 in a serious condition.
The blasts set the building ablaze and sparked multiple fires nearby. A bus, tram and 26 other vehicles were damaged, with photos circulating online showing horrific scenes of death and devastation.
Federov said two women were also killed in an airstrike on the town of Stepnohirsk, 20 miles southeast of Zaporizhzhia, in which their house was destroyed. A third woman and a man were pulled alive from beneath the rubble and taken to the hospital.
The attack was one of nine airstrikes that also hit Temyrivka, 60 miles east of Zaporizhzhia, and Malynyvka, 35 miles to the northwest, among more than 300 attacks across the province, mostly against a dozen settlements that came under artillery and rocket launcher fire and were targeted with more than 170 drones.
More than 50 residential buildings and infrastructure facilities were reported destroyed.
Four people were killed and 10 injured in neighboring Kherson province, after residential districts in more than 30 towns and cities came under attack, Gov. Oleksandr Prokudin reported.
Five civilians were injured in the northeastern province of Sumy, the regional military administration said, and in neighboring Kharkiv province two women, aged 42 and 67, were slightly injured by falling debris from drones shot down over Nove Pekelne village, according to Kharkiv Gov. Oleh Syniehubov.
They were among 70 Iranian-made Shahed attack drones and other types of UAVs launched against Poltava, Sumy, Kharkiv, Cherkasy, Chernihiv, Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson and Mykolaiv provinces, according to the Ukraine Air Force which said it downed two-thirds of them.
"A total of 24 enemy decoy drones disappeared from radar [without adverse effects]," the air force said.
However, houses in Kharkiv, Sumy, and Cherkasy provinces were reported damaged as a result of the downed drones.
The overnight onslaught came as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky headed to the U.S. Air Force base in Ramstein, Germany, on Thursday for a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group.
In a post on X, Zelensky said his defense minister, Rustem Umerov, had already begun meetings with Ukraine's allies at Ramstein and that additional negotiations were planned with partners at the level of defense ministers and military commanders.
"For Ukraine, the key priority is to continue strengthening our air defense systems and to ensure we can at least push Russian military aviation away from our cities and borders. This goal is achievable if our partners act now to implement the agreements we have been discussing for a long time," wrote Zelensky.
