Russian missile attack kills eight in Zaporizhzhia

A Russian missile attack has killed at least eight people and injured another 22 – including a child – in Ukraine’s southern city of Zaporizhzhia, local officials say.

As many as five people may still be trapped under rubble after Tuesday’s strike on a private clinic and residential buildings in the city centre, police say.

Overnight, rescuers pulled out two women from the wreckage. They are now being treated in hospital. A search and rescue operation is continuing.

Zaporizhzhia regional head Ivan Fedorov says Russia fired a ballistic missile, most likely an Iskander. Russia’s defence ministry has not commented.

Early on Wednesday, Zaporizhzhia’s regional authorities said six people were killed in the Russian strike.

Later in the day, they said one of the injured women died in hospital, and the body of another victim was pulled from the wreckage.

There are fears that the death toll will rise further, as the search operation continues.

Expressing condolences to the victims’ relatives, Fedorov also vowed that Russia would pay for “every Ukrainian life taken and mutilated”.

“We will not forgive!” he said.

A day of mourning has been declared in the Zaporizhzhia region on Wednesday.

Ukraine has repeatedly asked its Western allies to provide more advanced air defence systems to repel almost daily Russian missile and drone attacks.

Shortly after the Zaporizhzhia attack, President Volodymyr Zelensky reiterated that plea.

“We don’t have enough systems to protect our country from Russian missiles. But our partners have these systems. Again and again, we repeat that air defence systems should save lives, not gather dust in warehouses,” he said.

In a separate development on Tuesday, Ukraine and Russia accused each other of launching a drone attack on a convoy of vehicles transporting experts from the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The agency said one of its cars was “severely damaged” as the convoy was heading to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP). No injuries were reported.

IAEA head Rafael Grossi condemned the attack on his staff as “unacceptable”, stressing that the agency was “working to prevent a nuclear accident during the military conflict”.

Russia seized the ZNPP – Europe’s largest nuclear power plant – soon after launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Zaporizhzhia is one of Ukraine’s four south-eastern regions Russia claims to have annexed since 2022, without fully controlling any of them.

In 2014, Moscow illegally annexed Ukraine’s southern Crimea peninsula.