A Ukrainian firefighter works at the scene of a missile strike in the central city of Dnipro on Tuesday. Photo courtesy State Emergency Service/EPA
At least 20 people were killed and up to 300 injured in a massive Russian airborne assault on the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro in the country’s industrial heartland, authorities said Wednesday.
Dnipropetrovsk Gov. Serhii Lysak said in a social media update that the strikes during the daytime on Tuesday killed 18 people in Dnipro and two in a separate attack on Samar, 10 miles away to the northeast, with nearly 300 people injured across the province.
“The entire Dnipropetrovsk region is in mourning. This is a pain that resonates in every heart. That never goes away,” Lysak wrote.
President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was in The Hague meeting with European heads of government at an annual gathering of NATO, said many of the injured were passengers on a train.
“This strike hit numerous civilian infrastructure: homes, schools, and even a regular passenger train. There were more than 500 passengers on board. Five train cars were destroyed. There were no fatalities. All the injured have received medical assistance. It was another Russian strike on life,” he said in a post on X.
State-run Ukrainian Railways confirmed a missile struck near one of its trains en route from Odessa to Zaporizhzhia as it was passing through Dnipro and that dozens of passengers had been injured by flying glass.
The company said emergency workers moved passengers who were unhurt to the nearest subway station, from where they were able to make their way into Dnipro to catch a replacement train service to continue their journey to Zaporizhzhia, if they so wished.
Dnipropetrovsk is Zelensky’s home province.
The attacks mirrored a deadly wave of airstrikes on Kyiv last week that coincided with a meeting of the G7 group of countries in Canada. The group was formally the G8 — until Russia was ejected in 2014 over its invasion and annexation of Crimea.
Elsewhere, one person was killed and 10 injured in Kharkiv city and Kupiansk and surrounding areas after residences and other civilian infrastructure were targeted by Russian attack drones and warplanes launching air-to-surface rockets and glide bombs.
In the neighboring part-Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia province, which lies to the south of Dnipro, five people were injured after Russian forces carried out missile, drone and airstrikes on more than a dozen towns and opened fire with artillery.
Three people were killed near the frontline in Donetsk, according to Gov. Vadym Filashkin, less than 100 miles east of Dnipro, where Ukrainian forces are battling to hold off a Russian advance poised to break through to the west into Ukraine’s industrial heartland.
Earlier this month, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed that Russian troops and units of its 90th Guards Tank Division had penetrated into Dnipropetrovsk without resistance and were pushing forward.
Ukraine rejected the claim outright as fake news, but Emil Kastehelmi, an analyst at the Finland-based Black Bird Group, told the Kyiv Independent that geolocation data indicated an incursion by Russian troops had occurred.
Kastehelmi said that while he thought Russian forces would push on “at least somewhat” further west over the summer, he didn’t expect it to have much impact on the net state of play across the frontline.
Other military experts agreed.
They said the southeastern region of Ukraine would ultimately be penetrated by Russian forces, but only to a degree, as Moscow’s overarching goal was to capture the remaining areas of Donetsk it does not already control, and therefore neither side was likely to divert significant forces to the theater.
