Russian attacks kill 5, including family, in east Ukraine

Russian attacks kill 5, including family, in east Ukraine

Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, lies near the Russian border and has been under persistent bombardment for more than three years

Russian attacks killed at least five people, including three members of a displaced family, in separate attacks across Ukraine's war-scarred east, Ukrainian authorities said Thursday.

A couple and their 36-year-old son were killed in a village in the eastern Kharkiv region late Wednesday, local officials said. Two more women were killed in the Donetsk region Thursday.

Russia has stepped up drone and missile attacks on Ukraine more than three years into its invasion, even as the warring parties meet for ceasefire talks.

The Russian army has also been making advances on the ground. Families with children were ordered out of 10 settlements in Donetsk, including the town of Dobropillia, where 28,000 people lived before the war.

"I emphasise once again: staying in the Donetsk region is extremely dangerous," said regional governor Vadim Filashkin. 

Donetsk regional officials issued blurred images of one of the bloodied women killed in Kostyantynivka, where a dozen other people were wounded. Russian forces are gradually encircling the industrial hub.

A strike later on Kharkiv city wounded 37 people, including a 10-year-old girl and a 17-year-old boy and girl, the governor said.

A separate Russian drone and missile barrage wounded seven people overnight, including a child, in the central Ukrainian region of Cherkasy, emergency services said.

And in the southern port city of Odesa, a Russian drone attack wounded four people and badly damaged a famous market. Ukraine's prime minister said some of the buildings targeted were UNESCO protected.

"Russia continues its terror and obstructs diplomacy, which is why it deserves full-scale sanctions responses, as well as our strikes on their logistics, their military bases, and their military production facilities," President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on social media.

He said Russia had launched 103 drones -- mainly Iranian-designed Shahed unmanned aerial vehicles -- and four missiles.

In Russia, a Ukrainian drone strike killed two women and wounded several others in the southern city of Sochi, regional authorities said.

The Russian defence ministry said its air-defence systems had downed 39 Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles, mainly over southern regions of the country.

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