KYIV — Russia hit Ukraine’s key industrial city of Dnipro with ballistic missiles on Tuesday, causing massive destruction that killed 17 people and injured more than 270, local authorities reported.
“This is an unprecedented amount of destruction that the city has not seen in the entire time of [Russia’s] full-scale war,” Dnipro Mayor Borys Filatov said in a statement while announcing a day of mourning.
Russia has increased the frequency of its attacks on Ukraine since May when it launched a summer offensive in the conflict, now in its fourth year. It has also ramped up its production of drones: In June alone Moscow launched 2,736 Shahed kamikaze drones at Ukraine, the country’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an address to the parliament of the Netherlands on Tuesday. In addition, the Kremlin continues to launch dozens of missiles at Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the recent conflict between Israel and Iran has complicated Ukraine’s position, with the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump moving to the Middle East some of the unmanned aerial defense systems it had given Ukraine to counter Russia’s air assaults.
Moscow’s attack on Dnipro came only a day after it killed 9 people and wounded more than 30 in a deadly attack on the capital Kyiv.
In the Dnipro attack, Russian missiles damaged more than 40 schools and kindergartens along with a cathedral, a music hall, a sports arena, eight medical centers and hospitals and many residential buildings. A passenger train that had been heading from Odesa to Dnipro was also hit, Filatov reported.
Zelenskyy has been using his visit to the NATO summit in the Netherlands this week to push Ukraine’s allies to tighten their sanctions on Russia and to deepen the Kremlin’s international isolation. In February Zelenskyy said the U.S. had helped Russia to reemerge on the world stage; Trump has also refused to impose additional sanctions on Moscow, arguing “there’s a real chance of getting something done.”
“Russia cannot produce ballistic missiles without components from other countries. Russia cannot manufacture hundreds of other types of weapons without the parts, equipment and expertise that this deranged regime in Moscow does not possess on its own. That is why it is so important to minimize the schemes that connect Russia with its accomplices,” Zelenskyy said in a statement on Tuesday.
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