Ukraine war: Nine injured after Dnipro airstrike while missiles hit two Russian cities

Multiple people have been injured after Russian forces struck the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro.

Russia also pounded a key village in the southeast - that Ukraine claimed to have recaptured - while Moscow accused Kyiv of firing two missiles at southern Russia and wounding 20 people.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tweeted "Russian missile terror again" after nine people were injured in the area of a newly constructed and as yet unoccupied 12-story apartment building in Dnipro. An unoccupied adjacent Security Service of Ukraine building was also hit.

Video showed the apartment building’s upper floors in ruins, with grey smoke billowing from them, and flames raging in the night at ground level, where shattered concrete and glass littered a courtyard.

Russia has often struck apartment buildings during the conflict, while denying it intentionally targets civilians.

The Russian Defence Ministry said it shot down a Ukrainian missile in the city of Taganrog, about 24 miles east of the border with Ukraine, and local officials reported 20 people were injured, identifying the epicentre as an art museum.

Debris fell on the city, the ministry added, alleging the missile was part of a “terror attack” by Ukraine.

Oleksiy Danilov, Ukraine’s secretary of the National Security and Defence Council, blamed Russian air defence systems for the explosion.

Russia’s Defence Ministry said it downed a second Ukrainian missile near the city of Azov, which like Taganrog is in the Rostov region, and debris fell in an unpopulated location.

Earlier in the day, a Ukrainian drone was shot down outside Moscow, the Defence Ministry said, in the third drone strike or attempt on the capital region this month. The ministry reported no injuries or damage in the latest incident, and it didn’t give an exact location where the drone fell.

Since the war began, Russia has blamed Ukraine for drone, bomb and missile attacks on its territory far from the battlefield’s front line. Ukrainian officials rarely confirm being behind the attacks, which have included drone strikes on the Kremlin that unsettled Russians.

The strikes have hit Russian ammunition and fuel depots, as well as bridges the Russian military uses to supply its forces, and military recruitment stations. The attacks have also included killings of Russian-appointed officials on occupied Ukrainian territory.

Three months ago, a Russian warplane accidentally dropped a bomb on Belgorod, injuring two people, in an incident where Ukraine was initially suspected.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, meanwhile, marked Ukraine’s Statehood Day by reaffirming the country’s sovereignty — a rebuke to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who used his claim that Ukraine didn’t exist as a nation to justify his invasion.

“Now, like more than a thousand years ago, our civilizational choice is unity with the world,” Zelenskyy said in a speech on a square outside St. Michael’s Monastery in Kyiv. “To be a power in world history. To have the right to its national history -– of its people, its land, its state. And of our children -– all future generations of the Ukrainian people. We will definitely win!”

He also honoured servicemen and handed out first passports to young citizens as part of ceremonies. The holiday coincides with commemorations of the adoption of Christianity on lands that later became Ukraine, Russia and Belarus.

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