Ukraine finds nearly quarter of its air-raid shelters are locked or unusable
An inspection has found nearly a quarter of Ukraine's air-raid shelters are either locked or unusable.
The findings come just days after a woman in Kyiv reportedly died waiting outside a shuttered shelter during a Russian missile barrage - prompting a spike in concern for civilian safety.
On Saturday the Ukrainian interior ministry said that of the “over 4,800” shelters it had inspected, 252 were locked and a further 893 “unfit for use.”
That same day, the Kyiv regional prosecutor’s office reported that four people were detained in a criminal probe into the 33-year-old’s death on Thursday outside the locked shelter.
The prosecutor’s office said that one person, a security guard who had failed to unlock the doors, remained under arrest, while three others, including a local official, had been put under house arrest.
The suspects face up to eight years in prison for official negligence that led to a person’s death, according to officials. Also on Saturday, Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said that city authorities have received “more than a thousand" complaints regarding locked, dilapidated or insufficient air-raid shelters within a day of launching an online feedback service. In a Telegram update, Klitschko reported that “almost half” of the complaints concerned facilities being locked, while about a quarter had to do with them being in poor condition.
Some 250 Kyiv residents wrote in to complain of a lack of nearby shelters. The interior ministry said that over 5,300 volunteers, including emergency workers, police officers and local officials, would continue to inspect shelters across Ukraine. Russia on Thursday launched a pre-dawn missile barrage at the Ukrainian capital, killing a nine-year old girl, her mother, and another woman. It was the highest toll from a single attack on Kyiv over the past month.
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A 33-year-old woman died as she and others waited to enter a locked shelter, which left the group at the mercy of falling missile fragments, her husband told Ukrainian media. Late Saturday, the governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region, Serhiy Lysak, said 13 people were injured in shelling in the region.
One person was pulled from a damaged residential building in the town of Podgorodnenska and other were believed to be trapped in the rubble.
Elsewhere, Ukrainian regional officials reported Saturday morning that Russian shelling had killed at least four civilians across the country in the previous 24 hours.
A 67-year-old man died in the early hours of Saturday as Russian forces shelled the northeastern Kharkiv region, local governor Oleh Syniehubov said on Telegram.
According to Syniehubov, two other civilians were killed on Friday and overnight, while six more, including a 3-year-old boy, suffered wounds. In the Sumy province further west, a Russian mortar shell killed an 85-year-old man as he sat by the orchard outside his house, the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office reported Saturday.
Shelling also killed two people in Russia's Belgorod region just across the border, including an elderly woman who died on the spot, according to local governor Vyacheslav Gladkov.