dpa
Kiev
Four civilians were killed and a further three were injured by Russian bombardment in the Niu-York, or New York, settlement in eastern Ukraine, prosecutors in the Donetsk region reported on Friday.
Among the weapons used was a 250-kilogram glide bomb that damaged several residential blocks.
Russian forces have recently intensified attacks along the front near the town of Toretsk, which lies some 40 kilometres north of the Russian-occupied regional capital of Donetsk. They have secured minor territorial gains.
According to the local authority, at least three people were killed and almost 20 were injured by Russian action near Toretsk and Krakhove west of Donetsk on Thursday. More than 30 residential buildings were damaged.
One killed in Dnipro attacks At least one person died and nine others were injured including a 7-month-old baby when a Russian rocket struck a high-rise building in Dnipro in eastern Ukraine, Dnipropetrovsk Governor Serhiy Lysak reported on his Telegram channel.
Two women aged 27 and 30, and a man aged 29, were in a critical condition. Two more people are believed to have been buried in the rubble.
Images revealed a severely damaged main entrance to a nine-storey building in a dense residential area. The upper four storeys have been destroyed.
The industrial city on the Dnipro River has been the target of repeated Russian attacks. In one of the worst, 45 people died and around 80 were injured when a residential block was hit at the start of 2023.
Responding to the attack, President Volodymyr Zelensky called once again for the country’s air defences to be improved.
Ukrainian prisoners returning home According to information from Kiev, 10 Ukrainian civilians have returned home from Russian captivity.
Nariman Dzhelyal, a leader of the Crimean Tatars, was among those released, Zelensky wrote on social networks on Friday. He thanked the Vatican for its mediation in the release of the civilians.
Dzhelyal was detained back in 2021 in Crimea, which was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014, before the large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, and was later sentenced to 17 years in prison. He is alleged to have blown up a gas pipeline.
According to Zelensky, several other prisoners were also detained in Russia or Belarus before the war. The prisoners also included two priests from the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
There is no information as to whether Russians were also released from Ukrainian custody in return. However, the last prisoner exchange between Kiev and Moscow a few days ago included a metropolitan of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is considered loyal to the Kremlin, who was promptly honoured with a medal by Russian Patriarch Kirill after his arrival in Moscow.
Heating plant obliterated by Russian attack In western Ukraine, repeated Russian attacks on the Burshtyn district heating plant some 130 kilometres from the Polish border have destroyed it completely.
“It has been clear for some time that the Burshtyn heating plant cannot be rebuilt,” the governor of the Ivano-Frankivsk region, Svitlana Onyshchuk, said during a broadcast on local radio.
She said there had been more than 12 attacks. Local residents are to be provided with district heating in the coming winter by means of boilers.
Russia has repeatedly attacked power stations and district heating plants using drones and missiles since the invasion in February 2022.
