April 20, 2024
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The death toll from a missile attack on apartment buildings in a southern Ukrainian city rose to 11 as more Russian missiles and — for the first time — explosive-packed drones targeted Ukrainian-held Zaporizhzhia on Friday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin this week illegally claimed four regions of Ukraine as Russian territory, including the Zaporizhzhia region that is home to a sprawling nuclear power plant under Russian occupation; the city of the same name remains under Ukrainian control.
Fighting near the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant has alarmed the U.N.'s atomic energy watchdog. An accident there could release 10 times the amount of potentially lethal radioactivity than the world’s worst nuclear accident did in Chernobyl 36 years ago, Ukrainian Environmental Protection Minister Ruslan Strilets said Friday.
“The situation with the occupation, shelling, and mining of the Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plants by Russian troops is causing consequences that will have a global character,” Strilets told The Associated Press in an email interview while attending a U.N. conference in Cyprus.
With its army losing ground to a Ukrainian counteroffensive in the country's south and east, Russia has deployed Iranian-made drones to attack Ukrainian targets. The unmanned, disposable “kamikaze drones” are cheaper and less sophisticated than missiles but have proved effective at causing damage to targets on the ground.
The regional governor, Oleksandr Starukh, said Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones damaged two infrastructure facilities in the city of Zaporizhzhia, the first time they were used there. He said missiles also struck the city again, injuring one person.
The Emergency Services of Ukraine said the toll of Russian S-300 missile strikes on the city a day earlier rose to 11 and another 21 people were rescued from the rubble of destroyed apartments.
“This was not a random hit, but a series of missiles aimed at multi-story buildings,” Starukh wrote on his Telegram channel.
Russia was reported to have converted the S-300 from its original use as a long-range antiaircraft weapon into a missile for ground attacks because of a shortage of other, more suitable weapons.
The Ukrainian military said most of the drones it shot down Thursday and into Friday were the Iranian-made Shahed-136. The weapons are unlikely to significantly affect the course of the war, however, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said.
“They have used many drones against civilian targets in rear areas, likely hoping to generate nonlinear effects through terror. Such efforts are not succeeding,” analysts at the think tank wrote.
