A Ukrainian missile attack on the Russian city of Donetsk has killed a woman and her four-year-old son, Mayor Aleksey Kulemzin said on social media on Saturday.
Ukrainian forces shelled the city several times over the course of the day, damaging a total of 18 residential buildings and three civilian infrastructure facilities in Donetsk and the nearby town of Gorlovka, the local authorities said.
A Ukrainian projectile struck the house where the woman and her child lived, causing a fire, Kulemzin said. According to Russian media reports, the family home was burnt out completely. Russia’s MK newspaper reported that the two were “burned alive.”
Several media outlets also published a video purportedly showing what was left of the building. Footage show the ruins of a single-story house, with its roof destroyed and little but walls burnt on the inside remaining.
According to Kulemzin, six people were also injured in other Ukrainian strikes targeting various city districts on Saturday.
Kiev’s forces shelled the area using Soviet-made Grad multiple rocket launchers and the 155mm artillery provided by Western nations, Russian outlet Izvestia reported. A local school was also hit in the strike, it added.
The strike came just a day after six children were injured in a Ukrainian strike on another Donbass city, Lugansk. Remnants of a US-made ADM-160B decoy missile were found in Lugansk after the attack.
Ukrainian forces have repeatedly shelled not just Donbass but also Russian border regions since the conflict began in February of last year.
Last week, Kiev’s troops struck a school in the town of Shebekino, located just around 20km (12 miles) from the Ukrainian border, in Russia’s Belgorod Region. No one was hurt in the school itself – which was closed on the day of the strike – but the attack left one person injured nearby, the local authorities said.
In late April, four civilians were killed in a Ukrainian attack on Russia’s Bryansk Region. One house was completely destroyed in the attack and two others were damaged, the governor of the region, Aleksandr Bogomaz, said.