At least six people were killed and nearly 100 injured in a Russian bomb attack on the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv

CNN
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A day of mourning was declared in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on Saturday after rescuers and emergency response teams completed their operations following a Russian bomb attack that killed at least six civilians, including a child on a playground.

At least 97 people, including 24 children, were wounded when Moscow dropped five aerial bombs on the city, Ukrainian authorities said, in one of the most serious Russian attacks on the region this summer.

According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, among the dead was 14-year-old Sofia, who was killed on a playground on Friday.

“These terrible, cowardly Russian attacks targeted ordinary homes and a city park. Russia will be held accountable for all its wrongdoings,” Zelensky said, again pressing Western allies to step up their military support.

“We need decisions – decisions that our partners can make, decisions of those countries that have the ability to provide us with the ability to destroy Russian military aircraft at their bases, where the elimination of these terrorists and their aircraft will be most effective,” he said on Friday.

According to the head of the Kharkiv regional prosecutor’s office, Oleksandr Filchakov, Russian forces carried out a “massive bombing” of the city using Su-34 fighter jets that were deployed from the border region of Belgorod.

According to Ukrainian officials, the 500-kilogram (1,100-pound) guided aerial bombs were launched from Russian territory and are very difficult to intercept.

“It is a bomb with a control module, which means that the enemy specifically targeted residential infrastructure,” Oleh Synehubov, head of the Kharkiv regional military administration, said on Saturday.

The most effective way to prevent such attacks is to attack aircraft carrying bombs, Zelensky argued, and he continued to call on the United States and Western partners to lift restrictions on the use of long-range weapons to attack military targets on Russian territory.

In the Friday afternoon attack, air bombs hit civilian infrastructure in four districts of the city, Filchakov said. He added that 82 residential buildings, 11 private homes, three administrative buildings, two educational institutions, 47 commercial facilities, 57 cars, two warehouses, 10 garages and an enterprise building were damaged.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian attacks on the border with Russia continued on Saturday.

At least five people have died and more than 50 have been injured in Russia’s Belgorod region over the past 24 hours, the regional governor said on Saturday.

Most of the casualties occurred in the city of Belgorod, where three people were killed and 31 civilians, including three children, were wounded. More than 20 people remained in hospital Saturday, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said.

He added that civilian infrastructure has been destroyed throughout the region.

Ukrainian attacks in Russia’s Kursk region also continued, Moscow said Saturday. Kiev’s forces made further progress in their invasion of the border region, the Ukrainian military chief said Friday.

Kiev troops have advanced as much as 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) in some areas in the past 24 hours, taking control of an additional 5 square kilometers (3.1 square miles) of territory, Ukraine’s top commander Oleksandr Syrsky said on Friday.

In addition to the victims in Kharkiv, at least three people have been killed and 16 injured in Russian attacks on Ukrainian territory over the past 24 hours, authorities said.

The Ukrainian Aerospace Forces said on Saturday that Russian forces attacked Ukraine at night using an Iskander-M ballistic missile fired from the Voronezh region, four S-300 anti-aircraft guided missiles fired from occupied parts of the Donetsk region and 52 Shahed drones fired from the Kursk region.