Eight killed in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk in major Russian attack on homes and train station

A major Russian missile attack has killed at least eight people and injured 21 others in central Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk, officials said.

They said the missiles targeted a residential building and railway station.

Of these, two people were killed in Dnipro and six in Synelnykivskyi district of the region, interior minister Ihor Klymenko said.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said the attack damaged multiple storeys of a residential building and a train station in Dnipro, the regional capital.

“Russia must be held accountable for its terror, and all missiles and ‘Shahed’ drones must be intercepted. The world can ensure this, and our partners possess the necessary capabilities. This has been demonstrated in the skies over the Middle East, and it should also work in Europe,” he said on X, formerly Twitter.

The Ukrainian president said the war-hit nations’ allies should persuade its partners not to store the air defence systems in warehouses but in fact deploy them in “real cities and communities facing terror”.

“We must defeat Russian terror. It is necessary not only for our country and Ukrainians, but for the entire world,” he said, as he shared the photos of the site of the attack.

The Ukrainian leader has been pleading for Western aid and speedy assistance in stopping and fighting back the aggressive Russian missile attacks that have picked pace in the past month.

State-run Ukrainian railways company Ukrzaliznytsia said Russia’s attack deliberately targeted its infrastructure in the region, injuring its workers. The company closed its station in Dnipro and rerouted trains set to pass through the city.

Russian officials mostly do not issue comments on routine missile strikes inside Ukraine.

Moscow also claims that it is not targeting civilian infrastructure in its course of 25-month-long invasion. However, it has fired hypersonic and ballistic missiles on Ukrainian cities, maternity hospitals, colleges, universities, museums and shelter facilities.

The war in Ukraine has reached a critical phase with Russian troops ramping up pressure on exhausted Ukrainian forces who are not being given ample ammunition by Kyiv’s allies, required to stop Russian missiles from entering Ukrainian cities.

Russian forces are grinding on to seize more land this spring and summer even as new analysis shows the heavy attrition rate. More than 50,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine since the Kremlin invaded its neighbour more than two years ago, according to BBC’s latest analysis.

The number of deaths was nearly 25 per cent higher last year than in the first 12 months of the war, according to the BBC. The broadcaster used graves, open-source information from official reports, newspapers and social media to confirm the deaths.

Some 27,300 Russian soldiers died in the second year of the conflict as Moscow pursued its so-called meat grinder strategy of sending waves of cannon fodder troops to the front line to try to wear down Ukraine forces and expose their locations.

With the war in Ukraine now in its third year and a vital US aid package for Kyiv slowed down in Congress, Russia has increasingly used satellite-guided gliding bombs – which allow planes to drop them from a safe distance – to pummel Ukrainian forces beset by a shortage of troops and ammunition.