A journalist for the Reuters news agency was missing on Sunday and two others were wounded after the hotel in which they were staying in the city of Kramatorsk, in eastern Ukraine, was hit in a strike, Reuters and a Ukrainian military official said.
The strike hit the Hotel Sapphire on Saturday where a six-person Reuters team had been staying, said the Reuters statement, which gave no details of the episode or the identity of those involved. It was not immediately clear whether the hotel had been deliberately targeted.
Thousands of Ukrainian and international journalists have reported on the war, and Reporters Without Borders said in February that more than 100 journalists had been “victims of violence” in the conflict.
The long front line in eastern Ukraine has been one of the deadliest parts of the country for journalists; its towns and cities, including Bakhmut and Sievierodonetsk, have been the site of some of the war’s fiercest fighting.
Before the war, Kramatorsk had a population of around 150,000 people, but it has been attacked repeatedly and was the site of one of the war’s deadliest attacks on civilians. Many people have heeded an evacuation order from the Ukrainian government.
The city lies around 16 miles west of the front line. The capture of Kramatorsk remains a long-term military objective for Moscow if it is to achieve its aim of securing the whole of the Donetsk region.
“The Russians hit Kramatorsk,” the head of the regional military administration, Vadym Filashkin, wrote on the Telegram messaging app, saying the attack took place overnight. He said that a journalist was missing and two others were injured. A nearby high-rise building was also attacked, he said, adding that emergency services were working to clear the debris.
It was not possible to verify whether Russia was responsible as Mr. Filashkin claimed.
Russia’s Ministry of Defense made no reference to an attack on Kramatorsk in its daily report on the fighting. The Russian state news agency TASS carried a report about the strike that quoted Reuters as having said the injuries were caused by “a suspected missile strike.”
Shelling and other forms of aerial attack take a daily toll on civilians in the Donetsk region, given its proximity to the front line. Mr. Filashkin said seven civilians were killed and 15 others were wounded the previous day during attacks on the city of Kostiantynivka, which is southeast of Kramatorsk, and other towns.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, and the pace of territorial change has slowed. But Moscow has been on the offensive this year, making gains in Donetsk after the failure of a Ukrainian counteroffensive last year to meet its key objectives. Trying to change the dynamic in the conflict, Ukraine began an incursion into Russia’s Kursk region on Aug. 6.
That offensive was partly aimed at diverting Russian forces from the eastern front in the Donetsk region, the part of the long front line that has been most active this year, but it has slowed in recent days.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said one aim of the incursion was to demonstrate that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was more interested in retaining territory Moscow has occupied in Ukraine than defending Russian villages.
Russia illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it has occupied parts of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions in southern Ukraine as well as a substantial part of Ukraine’s east.
Both sides have kept up a daily barrage of cross-border fire along Ukraine’s northeastern border with Russia, even as the Kursk offensive has continued, that continued into the weekend.
Shelling in the small Russian town of Rakitnoye, which is in the Belgorod region and around 15 miles from the border, killed five people and left 12 people wounded, the regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said in a post on Telegram on Sunday. “A difficult night for the whole region,” he said.
In northeastern Ukraine, Russian forces pounded the Sumy region with more than 74 artillery, mortar and drone strikes over the past 24 hours, the region’s military administration said on social media in a daily report late Saturday. Three people were killed and nine others were wounded.
There was no independent confirmation of either of the reports.
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