KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – Rescue workers worked through the night more than seven hours after a Russian missile struck a private clinic in a southern Ukrainian city, killing eight people and injuring 22 others. rescued two women from the rubble, authorities said Wednesday.
Ukraine's emergency services said the women called rescuers on their cellphones late Tuesday to say they were trapped under rubble after the attack in Zaporizhzhia.
Deadly Russian attacks on civilian areas have been a feature of the nearly three-year war. Ukraine's Western allies are sending more aid to continue the fight against Russian aggression, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy says the Zaporizhzhia attack means the country needs more air defense systems. He said that it was shown that.
He urged Western countries to send weapons stored in their arsenals.
“Currently, we do not have sufficient systems to protect our country from Russian missiles. But our partners have such systems,” President Zelenskiy said late Tuesday in his daily address to the nation.
Air defense systems owned by Ukraine's allies “should save lives and not collect dust in storage bases,” he said.
Meanwhile, Ukraine continued long-range attacks on areas behind Russian lines supporting the war effort.
Governor Alexander Bogomaz said a Ukrainian drone attack caused a fire at an industrial facility in Russia's Bryansk region.
Russia's Ministry of Defense announced that its air defense forces shot down 14 Ukrainian drones over the Bryansk region early Wednesday morning.
A Ukrainian missile attack on the city of Taganrog in the Rostov region also damaged a factory early Wednesday, regional governor Yuri Sursar said.
President Zelensky thanked the Ukrainian military for attacking “military installations and facilities of fuel and energy complexes on Russian territory.”
“It is exactly this kind of long range and precision that will gradually bring Russia back to reality, which is that the war must end,” he said on Telegram.
Neither side's claims could be verified.
