Two children among seven dead in fresh Ukraine, Russia strikes

KYIV - Russian aerial attacks on April 7 killed four people, including a child, in Ukraine as a drone strike by Kyiv hit a house in Russia, killing a child and his parents, according to reports from local officials on both sides.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, launched more than four years ago, has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and displaced millions in the bloodiest conflict in Europe since World War II.

The two sides have stepped up deadly long-range drone and missile attacks in recent months, mainly targeting energy infrastructure, with Moscow aiming to dent Ukrainian resolve and Kyiv targeting Russian energy revenues.

In Russia, a Ukrainian drone strike on a residential building killed a boy, born in 2014, and two adults in the Russian region of Vladimir, east of Moscow, Governor Alexander Avdeev said.

The couple’s five-year-old daughter was taken to hospital with burns.

The region is more than 500km from the fighting in eastern Ukraine.

In Ukraine, a Russian drone attack on a passenger bus in the frontline city of Nikopol killed at least three people and wounded 12 others.

The bus was “pulling up to the stop – there were people both on board and at the stop”, the head of the region’s military administration Oleksandr Ganzha wrote on social media.

He posted photos showing a yellow mini-bus ripped open in the attack and the bloodied remains of those killed strewn around the street in the aftermath.

“This was not a random strike. It was a deliberate act of terror against civilians,” he added.

Nikopol, which had a pre-war population of around 100,000 people, lies on the banks of the Dnipro river that cuts through Ukraine and forms a de facto front line in the south of the country.

It is in the Dnipropetrovsk region where Russian ground forces are battling to advance.

Moscow’s army has been regularly attacking civilians in their cars or in public transport with drones over the Dnipro waterway.

The strike in Nikopol is the latest in a series of deadly attacks in recent days that have spurred Ukrainian officials to warn that the situation in the city could further deteriorate.

Overnight, a separate Russian drone strike on the Dnipropetrovsk region killed an 11-year-old boy and wounded five others when a house caught fire, governor Ganzha said earlier. AFP