A Russian guided bomb attack on the eastern Ukrainian town of New York wounded at least three people and destroyed six three-storey buildings, officials said.
Ukraine has seen a steep rise in civilian casualties since December as Moscow intensifies air attacks, reversing a downward trend seen earlier in 2023, the United Nations has warned.
“Three people are currently known to be wounded. Five more are probably under the rubble. Six three-storey buildings and five private houses were destroyed,” the interior ministry said.
Rescuers combed through the rubble of what appeared to be the collapsed section of an apartment block overnight, photos published by the ministry showed.
New York, in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region, found itself on the front line of Ukraine’s war with Russian-backed separatists in 2014 and remains close to the fighting.
The town is thought to have been founded by members of the Mennonite Church who settled in the region under Catherine the Great but the origin of its name remains a mystery.
It was renamed “Novgorodske” (“New Town”)by the Soviet authorities for ideological reasons in 1951, and reclaimed the moniker New York following a vote by Ukrainian MPs in 2021.
Girl injured in Ukraine drone barrage in Russia: governor
Russia said that a young girl was injured during an attack by a barrage of drones launched by Kyiv, in the latest aerial assault to target the country’s border regions.
Moscow has accused Ukrainian forces of ramping up fatal artillery and drone attacks on Russia’s border regions, some of which have announced voluntary evacuations over the strikes.
The defence ministry in Moscow announced it had downed a dozen Ukrainian drones over the Belgorod and Voronezh regions near Ukraine.
Images distributed by the Voronezh governor Alexander Gusev showed a blackened residential building, where the child was injured by fragments of a drone that was shot down.
The mayor of the region’s main city, also called Voronezh, said a state of emergency had temporarily been introduced in the aftermath of the attacks.
Earlier this month, Russia admitted it had accidentally bombed Voronezh but stressed there were no casualties.
